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Comment by me551ah | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that the list doesn't mention consolas. It ships default with visual studio and it's so good that I use it on arch Linux as my terminal font and with intellij. It was designed with programming in mind and has some nifty characteristics like a slash through zero. This list also misses out on 'operator mono' which is a well thought out font for programming.

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Hi, I'm the author of programmingfonts.org. Operator Mono certainly is pretty. I always loved consolas on Windows (honestly, it's the only thing that rendered properly on Win7). That said, I can only include fonts that are freely available, or where the owner of the font allows me to (in the case of Input Mono). I have tried for a few others, but haven't been so lucky there. So, no proprietary or otherwise commercial fonts. I do try to feature them on the blog though.

You can always use a static .svg or .png in place.

That's what I feature on the blog, but you'll notice the right-hand side of app.programmingfonts.org is interactive. That's kinda hard to do with static images ;)

Would it violate the ToS to create a simple sprite sheet out of a proprietary fixed-width font?

I don't think the author needs to go to such lengths just to support some proprietary fonts, specially considering that there are great free and open options.

Sure, but that's not really an answer to the question!

You seem quite interested in the answer, so surely you can spend the required time reading the ToS of the various fonts yourself.

Please come back and let us know what you find!

It probably would. Redistributing the font in another form is usually a violation. It’s also severely impractical ;)

Thanks very much for this, klageveen! I chose my default mono font the hard way and wish I'd known about your site back then.

Even so, comparing each font on your site affirmed my choice (Hack ftw). I'll be back, though, and will check out your blog in the mean time.

After going throw the list and trying out many of them in my editor, I also picked Hack. What a beautiful font, even in surprisingly small sizes.

It really is beautiful. It's a variant of Deja Vu, as I recall, and its hinting is perfect on my display. The feature I really needed, though, was good Unicode coverage, especially for math and logic symbols, and Hack has that spades.

Can't you have a "system fonts" section that uses the fonts already installed, so people can compare if they are running the respective OS?

Well, there is no way to get a list of installed fonts via the browser, but I have thought about adding an input so you can try installed fonts. I just don't have enough time to tackle all the ideas I have!

Check out B612 Mono

http://b612-font.com/

Have you looked at the licensing of the Lucida family of fonts (particularly Sans Typewriter and Console)? From a quick check it looks like just the old bitmap fonts are available for redistribution, and all the scalable varieties are proprietary, but I'm also seeing some contradictory information, so I'm not 100% certain on that. If allowed it would be a great addition to the site.

I have looked at it but have not found a suitable variant. All I find are commercial versions and “The fonts are not redistributable”. Honestly, I doubt bitmap versions are useful for most people.

It would be great if I can filter those fonts that support ligatures (Like Fira Code).

Some that have ligatures state it after the year they cameo out. For fonts that don't have ligatures on their own you could use something like Ligaturizer. This adds ligatures based on the Fira Code font to any other font. These ligatures are taken verbatim from Fira Code though, so some will not match perfectly with their non-ligature counterpart.

Consolas is a proprietary font, and this list includes only free and/or open source fonts. It does include the similar Inconsolata.

Though Inconsolata was inspired by Consolas, I wouldn't consider it all that similar. For example, the digits in Inconsolata are much closer to the Franklin Gothic model. Also, Consolas has excellent hinting for Windows, while Inconsolata was originally designed with no hinting at all. They're not drop-in replacements.

Seconded, Inconsolata at small sizes looks awful on Windows.

I'm surprised that so many of these 'programming' fonts do not have dotted or slashed zeros. For a programming font, that's a must-have requirement for me. I edited Droid Sans Mono, so that its zero had a slash, and now I use it as my go-to font for all my IDEs and terminals. However after browsing this lot, I'm tempted to give Go Font a try.

For those unaware, raphlinus actually created Inconsolata.

I’m a fan of Inconsolata, and it’s my daily driver in terminals and editor. Thank you.

Although Consolas is beautiful on Windows (and is one of my favourite monospace fonts), Inconsolata for me looks very good on Windows 10 (as I remember it didn't quite look as good on Windows 7). In fact, because the font is slightly thicker at lower font sizes, I find it easier to see and use -- so it's currently my default font in PuTTY and VS Code, for instance.

Thank you for your work on Inconsolata.

It is a Windows default font. Since you need admin rights to install fonts in Windows, it may be the only good programming font a corporate user have.

Lucida Console isn't too bad either -- it's very legible at small font sizes. On some of my work and personal systems I also have Lucida Sans Typewriter[1] (IIRC it was bundled with Office), which is taller and subjectively slightly better looking than Lucida Console

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/lucida...

Thanks for mentioning it! I just compared Consolas with the default Menlo along with Hack, and I do like the roundedness in Consolas.

Consolas ships with Windows itself since Win7.

That still doesn't make it free & legal to distribute as a web font so that it displays to people who don't run Windows (or otherwise have Consolas installed), so it would be more than legally dubious to include it in this site without express permission from MS (or who-ever they licensed the work from, if it wasn't created internally).

I agree on Consolas. I'm a Mac user and it has replaced Inconsolata which I used for years.

Yeah, I was redesigning my website and decided to use system fonts. When I added the system don't for monospacw text, I was amazed at how nice Consolas came out.

> Operator Mono SSM

A steal at $199!

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