Alternative monospace fonts for programmers | Hacker News Reader

Alternative monospace fonts for programmers

retrocode.blogspot.com

28 pointsimpomatic25 comments

It's kinda hard to evaluate the fonts when only fully capitalised samples are used. COBOL went out with Clement Atlee - we kinder, gentler Rubyist types like our lower case code.

I second the lower case, being a Linux user type. I was also expecting more analysis in this post than just whether the zeros were slashed or not. adg below posted a link to a former and similar article that I think has that analysis I was looking for.

Fonts like Consolas or Inconsolata are designed to be used with subpixel rendering, that's why they look all jacked up without it.

If subpixel rendering hurts your eyes, you probably need to tune it to your monitor.

Years ago, I remember doing a terrific amount of whining about how sub-pixel font rendering was blurry and pointless. But really it's simply a matter of adjusting to the benefits.

Anyway, I'm using 'Consolas' on Windows and 'Menlo' on Mac and am happy with both.

I second the recommendation to tune the subpixel rendering using your OS's wizard. Both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 make this very easy. The difference is very apparent and worth it.

They look much better with sub-pixel rendering but thanks to different sub-pixel geometries taking a screenshot doesn't really work.

I use consolas on windows and linux and it is by far the nicest programming font I've ever used, surprised it didn't get more of a look-in, though obviously sub-pixel rendering is required for it to not look awful. Pity they didn't compare it with sp-r turned on. Oh well!

My pet peeve is that Eclipse crashes when I set Consolas the default font. Crash occurred within libpango. So I'm stuck with Andale Mono (a decent substitute). I will have to look into it again one of these days.

Inconsolata is nice, but the angled quotes annoy me. Fortunately, someone fixed that: http://nodnod.net/2009/feb/12/adding-straight-single-and-dou...

Related discussion on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058946

I'm still a bit sad Schumacher Clean never shows up in these lists.

I recommend Terminus (it's not in the list).

ProFontWindows is also not in the list. But it's great for a small font-size but keeping the code readable.

Ooo.... thanks for the ProFontWindows recommendation.

Just curious: Are you being cynical?

Not at all. I switched, and love it. Console windows love the suggestion, and Eclipse is running with it. I'm still debating on the size, but it was a great suggestion. I'm glad you replied, as I can now give you another upvote. =)

Since I stare at Terminal.app for 10+ hours a day, I'm nearly obsessive-compulsive about my font setup.

Inconsolata is my font of choice on the list. It looks beautiful, black background, 15pt, antialiased.

I've been using the Bitstream Vera fonts for over a year now. The main draws were:

- zero distinguished from O, lower case L from 1

- clean, unpixelated characters

- supports bolding, so I can use that in my editor's styles

- is part of a family with a serif and sans serif font, so I can use the same fonts as my defaults everywhere (and I now notice that HN uses Courier for its textarea, ick)

This is basically of a rip-off of this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=615088.

Why is it a rip off? Just because half of the fonts are listed in both articles?

I enjoy TheSansMonoCd by LucasFonts. It costs money though.

http://imgur.com/kBpMI.png

this has been already discussed in detail on SO. link : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4689/recommended-fonts-fo...

I will offer a name, see if you can find it: SGIScreen.

http://steveblock.com/r/sgiscreen-ttf.tar.gz

Looks pretty good at 14pt in Terminal.app. Thanks.

If you're going to do a comparison of programming fonts at small sizes, at least bother to get optimal font rendering for small fonts. Your worst looking fonts are the nicest with proper rendering.

Also "alternative"? Every programmer I know has heard of these...

"Every programmer I know has heard of these..." - Absolutely.

The frequency of these "lightweight" articles has increased of late (e.g. Linode,Slicehost gets newest release of Ubuntu, JavaScript starter link, etc.).

May be this is an indication of the changing demographics here on HN. It is called Hacker News and calling Consolas, BitStream Vera as alternative is just "newbism".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com