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Comment by klausa | Hacker News Reader

I'm slightly surprised that almost nobody here uses Menlo or Monaco, even though several screenshots in the thread are clearly made on OS X.

I'm curious why that's the case. Do people generally dislike the system-provided fonts or are the alternatives considered "better"?

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I love Menlo and use it almost exclusively, but the inline asterisk makes people upset for some reason. I personally prefer an inline asterisk.

Holy shit. You just made me realise why I actually love Menlo. (I'm an iOS dev, so I type and see a shitload of asterisks on a daily basis.)

Many alternatives "felt" wrong, but I never quite could put a finger on what's wrong with them.

Inline asterisks definitely feel just right at home when writing Obj-C.

Monaco 10 is the only true code font :) That is, until I get myself a retina Mac, of course.

Then I'll use an undecided vector font and the last remaining piece of resistance from classic Mac will be gone.

So true! The only thing I dislike about my retina Mac is that Monaco 10 no longer looks right.

I moved to Inconsolata (with subpixel font smoothing):

https://discuss.atom.io/t/why-is-the-text-display-inferior-t...

Menlo is nicely tuned for retina displays.

That's painfully true. When I got my 13" retina mac, I literally couldn't decide on a terminal font for two weeks, switching them every few hours.

Nothing looked right. Nothing does even now, half a year later. Though personally, 12pt Monaco feels least "wrong".

I'm a huge Monaco fan. Slightly disappointed that Apple chose a Bitstream Sans derivative for its default monospace font. I don't dislike Bitstream/Deja Vu/Panic Sans/Menlo - it just feels derivative at this point and Apple often take opinionated stances on typefaces.

Nothing beats the lowercase "a" in Monaco.

I feel like it has a bit of whimsy that other fixed with fonts don't have. It's not stuffy or pretentious. None of the bowls are circular or ovular (except for the "o") all of the ASCII range characters are distinct. It looks great in its bitmap or anti-aliased vector versions.

I came to Mac OS recently from Linux and while I like Menlo, I found myself quickly going back to Inconsolata[1], which is really great for long coding hours, and works especially well for me with the dark solarized color scheme.

[1]: http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html

I've been using Monaco for Powerline for quite a long while now. The main issue is that most of the builtin proportionally-spaced fonts have some glyphs which are difficult to distinguish. Monaco gets the job done but other people prefer slightly different glyph styles or want to make their own fonts, more power to them.

+1 for Menlo. I've tried all the fonts recommended here on HN and I always go back to Menlo.

I've been using Monaco 9 since I first started hacking away in HyperCard and BBEdit, and when OS X started screwing up the antialiased version of it I switched to ProFont which looks identical but scales properly

I use Menlo in both the terminal and my editor, and am sure A good portion of of my coworkers use Monaco.

Yes, Menlo is my go-to font, I use it in the terminal and with Xcode. Always had.

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