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Hivelogic - Top Programming Fonts
- ComputerGuru 17y agoGreat article, and awesome fonts. But for the record, OS X now ships with a new default monospace font called Menlo which is quite nice... but it's really just Deja Vu Sans Mono with modified punctuation (most importantly though is the slash through the zero). View it here: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2009/06/snow-leopards-new-monospaced-font/ http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2009/06/snow-leopards-new-m...
- rue 17y agoThere is nothing that surpasses SGIscreen at 10 or 11px. As a bonus, it requires some leetness to find and use.
- anigbrowl 17y agoWhat, no love for Lucida Console? For shame, Mr Benjamin, for shame. [/typeface melodrama]
- limmeau 17y agoLucida Sans Typewriter 12 for everything (on my 1280x1024 screens at work). The 75dpi bitmap font. I even installed my own Emacs 23 with freetype support at work, but after trying EnvyCodeR and Consolas and Anonymous and what have you, I went back to lucidasanstypewriter.
- palehose 17y agoCall it stealing if you want, but here is a little tutorial on how to get the non-free Consolas font without buying anything from Microsoft. The font is included in a free to download dmg file from microsoft. http://www.wezm.net/2009/03/install-consolas-mac-osx/ http://www.wezm.net/2009/03/install-consolas-mac-osx/
- NikkiA 17y agoThey give it away with all of their Visual * Express suites, and there is even a seperate .exe installer for it, so I don't really think it counts as stealing if you use some other method to get it in an easier form. But that's just me, I don't work for MS legal :)
- sp332 17y agoIt is a breach of contract (if the EULA is enforceable), but it's not a criminal act. And I doubt they'll go after anyone for it.
- yan 17y agoIt wasn't mentioned, but Pragmata is gorgeous. A bit pricey though.
- holygoat 17y agoIt was mentioned (at least when I read the post). I find Pragmata so narrow it hurts to read. :(
- sant0sk1 17y agoI'm a huge Inconsolata fan. I prefer it big (16pt) and use it pretty much everywhere.
- NikkiA 17y agoAgreed, it's 11pt Incosolata for me on my linux emacs, and 13pt Consolas on my windows emacs. Beautiful fonts.
- christopherdone 17y agoDeja Vu Sans Mono is highly superior to all the mentioned fonts there. It works perfectly clearly with anti-aliasing. I honestly wonder if the people praising other fonts are just trying to be different. I'm probably being subjective. It would be cool to see some research into the top programming fonts to find which are least tiring to the eyes, most legible when tired or scanning, etc.
- davidmathers 17y agoDeja Vu Sans Mono is highly superior to all the mentioned fonts there. ?? It's number 3 on the list.
- SlyShy 17y agoSome fonts I like that they left off: Envy Code R Pragmata Terminus
- Avshalom 17y agoAnother Envy Code R fan here.
- chrisallen 17y agoI use terminus for code everywhere.
- MartinCron 17y agoWith modern languages and IDEs, I don't see any benefit to using monospaced fonts at all. I have been using Calibri for the last few years because it is readable and pleasant to look at, and I never have any problems lining things up provided they actually need to line up.
- MartinCron 17y agoInstead of a downvote, how about a real explanation of why exactly monospaced fonts are actually required. This bit of programmer dogma is totally unfounded. There is nothing more to it than tradition.
- buugs 17y agoMaybe for the same reasons you offered: readability and easy to look at. Some modern monospaced fonts are rather nice to look at, Consolas for example, and the ability to distinguish between 0O1l easily is an advantage for some fonts without having weird letter spacings.
- MartinCron 17y agoDon't get me wrong, I love Consolas, but having all of the letters be the same width doesn't make sometthing more readable. When was the last time you saw a book or newspaper in Courier New? When I started my non-monospaced experiment 2 years ago, I, thought I might have trouble differentiating between 0O1Il, etc. but that has never been a problem in practice.
- jrockway 17y agoWhen you press the "next-line" key, it's nice to know where you're going to end up. With a non-monospaced-font, you have to guess or count. With a monospaced font, it is visually obvious.
- MartinCron 17y agoBut that is exactly how my next-line key behaves, my cursor is always exactly where it should be. It's not like your tabs/spaces vary in width from line to line it is just that an uppercase W is wider than a lowercase i.
- sker 17y agoI was a Consolas guy until I discovered Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. I find it more readable, you might want to check it out.
- jrockway 17y agoDeja Vu * is Bitstream Vera * with Unicode characters. Good if you're not using Emacs and want nice-looking λs in your code. (Emacs has a map from character range -> font, so you can use your own Unicode font along with your favorite ASCII font. But using Deja Vu means you don't have to configure that as much.) FWIW, I use Deja Vu Sans Mono for coding. It is a nice-looking font, especially when grey on black.
- jbr 17y agoMy favorite: http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymous.html http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymous.html (free) Installing anonymous is one of the first things I do when I get a new mac.
- ApolloRising 17y agoMy favorite as well for textmate and coda
- KevBurnsJr 17y agoI also use Anonymous (on a PC to program in PHP) Even though the tilde is janky. ~shrug
- there 17y agoam i the only one still using xterm with its default "fixed" font in black-on-white?
- Jeema3000 17y agoWingdings all the way
- artificer 17y agoNice article, but somewhat incomplete. He misses many fonts (like Lucida Console, Envy Code R, Anonymous, Redhat's excellent Liberation Mono,Pragmata and a whole lot of others), he doesn't explain the font differences other than noting which he likes more, like serif/sanserif, hinting quality, character set coverage (Greek? Cyrillic?) etc.
- derobert 17y agoNeep http://www.jmknoble.net/fonts/ http://www.jmknoble.net/fonts/ Unfortunately, its a bitmapped (non-scalable) font...