Beautiful fixed-width fonts for OSX | Hacker News Reader

Beautiful fixed-width fonts for OSX

monkey.org

21 pointsmariusae17 comments

Wow, this is the ugliest font I have ever seen. I do like the color-less syntax highlighting, though.

Also, Haskell looks nicer when you translate things like -> to →, \ to λ, and so on.

But really, both of these things would look nicer on high-resolution displays. When can I get a 1200dpi 24" monitor? (In the mean time, you can pry hinting and subpixel anti-aliasing from my cold, dead eyes. It's a necessity on the limited hardware that's currently available.)

I agree; it's grossly wide and so thin as to be almost illegibly sparkly when it's black-on-white. I don't even want to imagine what this face would look like knocked-out on black.

There's also a good comment on the source page about distinguishing zeros and ohs, especially when coding.

You can’t get a 1200dpi monitor but you can get a 250+dpi one if you start looking at medical displays. Obviously the more detail, the more accurate the diagnosis. They tend to be greyscale only though, and excitingly expensive ($10k+).

I'd recommend Consolas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolas

OS X Install → http://www.wezm.net/2009/03/install-consolas-mac-osx/

With slightly more effort it can be installed on linux.

Or DejaVu Sans Mono: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DejaVu_fonts

This makes me happy.

I tried to make 6x13 for OS X a while back: http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/fontstructions/show/6x13_redu...

Then I discovered the full set of characters (er, codepoints?) supported and pulled the emergency brake on that idea!

http://rasher.dk/rockbox/fonts/misc/6x13-full.png

Dominoes!

I know what my next pet-project will be.

My current favorite monospace font is Incosolata http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html It's an amazingly legible font and looks great and small and large font sizes.

I use misc fixed in a smaller size on osx in mrxvt (in X11 of course). Anti-aliasing turned off. 256 color goodness in terminal emacs, yummy. This terminal is incredibly fast (especially with anti-aliasing off), it'll scroll through a big file in the blink of an eye. I dislike having to wait when massive input is scrolling through a terminal. I totally love this setup, only caveat is that I need to attach a mouse to be able to paste into x11.

Here's a link to my .mrxvtrc file http://gist.github.com/277956

I like the monospaced font (I think it's called "Monospace") that comes with Gnome. And I have a version of Luxi Mono that has a dot in the middle of the 0 so that it's easier to spot it, but I haven't been using it much.

They are both Mac-friendly, AFAIK. Never tried to move them over to a Mac, but they do look good on Gnome/X.

Currently I am using "Envy Code R" as my monospaced font of choice.

And I would love to get screenshots of IBM's 3270 series terminals so I could draw that font as scalable fonts. I love its 6's and 9's.

Monospace under Gnome is, I believe, Vera Sans Mono. Apple ships a slightly tweaked version of this font in 10.6 as "Menlo."

I'll second the old IBM fetish. I spent so many hours on old IBM PC/RT terminals that I can't stand any other font now. It just feels like a programming font. I even drew a mimic font for MS-DOS.

Vera Sans and Menlo are pretty close.

I never saw an RT face-to-face, but I spent a couple months daily in front of 3278s. Now I own a 3151 connected to a RS/6000, but it's not the same.

I switched over to the Bistream Vera family ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Vera ) since it looked decent and had bold/oblique for the monospace font. I also switched some of my other applications over to use the variable width fonts in the family for consistency.

I've been a big fan of Droid Sans Mono for a while now. My preferred coding font: http://damieng.com/blog/2007/11/14/droid-font-family-courtes...

A font only a mother could love.

Terminus is what works for me. Still very clear and nice on the laptop screen. http://fractal.csie.org/~eric/wiki/Terminus_font

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