Programming Fonts
programmingfonts.org
programmingfonts.org
I've switched to Fira Mono since then and couldn't be happier. It feels like my type of font, very well designed, every letter is distinguishable and very readable.
Plus, who doesn't love the "@" and "&" in Fira Mono?! :)
Mono space fonts are hard to read, especially when skimming. So verdana just makes the whole experience of looking at my code more enjoyable and natural.
That said, I could never switch. Some of my team's code conventions depend on monospaced fonts, for good or for worse.
Programming Fonts
The most complete resource for
monospace fonts on the web.
(Ironically, that title and sentence are in a proportional font on the page!)I'm sad that so many developers think it's not code if it's not monospaced.
Of course, everyone has their own taste in fonts, and I have no beef with anyone who prefers some monospaced font or another. Fonts are a very personal choice.
On the flip side, though, there are too many coding standards that essentially prohibit developers from using proportional fonts. The biggest problems are two-space indents and column alignment (that is, alignment to specific columns after the initial indent, to match up text on previous lines).
In a proportional font, a two-space indent is like nothing. And column alignment doesn't work when you don't have columns!
I love the beauty and readability of proportional fonts, and I won't be going back to monospaced fonts. But I don't try to tell anyone else what to do: I write code in a way that makes it equally readable in monospaced or proportional fonts. That way everyone can view the code in the font they like.
I've written at some length about the problems with column alignment, so rather than repeat it, here are a couple of previous discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10206860
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9469713
My current favorite programming font is Trebuchet MS. Yes, really. It looks great on high-DPI displays on both Mac and Windows (in the somewhat large font sizes I prefer), and it makes all the confusing groups like O0 and 1l| easily distinguishable. About the only thing I don't like is that it has a really bad ~ glyph. Someday I must patch that.
These days, I just use the standard DejaVu Sans Mono for everything.
In KDE, you right-click on the font, go into the "Actions" sub-menu and choose "Install...". Gnome may be similar, but I'm not sure.
In most Linuxes, you can copy the fonts to "/usr/share/fonts/truetype" (as a GUI-independent install mechanism).
I don't have a Mac available to test, but I'd bet that there's a font-installation capability either by right-clicking on the font, or in whichever viewer opens when you double-click on it.