Top Programming Fonts

Completely agree, that's the font I love.

I tried Inconsolata briefly in my xterm window but ... I don't know, I didn't like it. I guess it's a subjective thing, but I dislike anti-aliased font, I prefer the crisp look of my fixed bitmap font. :-)

What if you have a high DPI monitor? Isn't that too hard to see?

Has anyone figured out the equivalent of this on OSX? I asked about this a while back on StackOverflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3275956/is-there-a-versio...

Would you consider taking a screenshot of how that looks?

You're right, that is annoying. Thanks for the link.

Awesome link, I've been using Inconsolata for years and had the exact same issue.

I love the straight quotes, but I'm experiencing increased vertical space between lines in the terminal as well. Seems like the author has the same "problem" judged by the screenshots posted.

There's another Inconsolata derivative named "Inconsolata-g" with straight quotes, dotted zeros, and other small fixes to make it a "programmer's font." http://leonardo-m.livejournal.com/77079.html

This is why Inconsolata beats every font. Because there's a 'mistake' in it, and it can be fixed because of the licensing. This stuff gets me very excited.

it's also got pretty poor unicode support, which bugs me just a little

Wow, thanks! I've been looking at some of the fonts (mainly Inconsolas-dz, Anonymous Pro, Droid and Vera) and this is a great font. Love it!

Terminus is awesome, it's a shame so many "top programming fonts" forget it.

Looking at the fonts he did select, it's clear why Terminus gets no mention: it's significantly different aesthetically, with squarer edges and more straight lines, etc., from his preferred fonts.

I used Terminus for many years. About 18 months ago I switched to gohufont -- http://font.gohu.eu/

A person can't fit quite as much on the screen but I find the extra spacing makes it much easier to read (eg emails).

Well I've just tried it for 10 minutes, and I have to say it seems to work better that i initially expected/feared. So you might not be as crazy as you sound :)

I might actually give it a few days and see what happens.

I've been using Verdana for coding for years, with some modifications. I've changed the parentheses, braces, operators etc. to be more prominent - that makes it just perfect for me.

Edit: screenshot here: http://i.imgur.com/xv5oz.png

My IDE is misconfigured, and for html/css code uses Arial, or some other proportional font.

It's just painful to watch!

The non grid alignment, randomness, just makes it more distracting to me. Perhaps if I was exposed to it for a long er period of time, a week as you suggested, this uneasiness will slowly fade.

But, let me ask you: What's that you find so good about it? More content in less space? Why won't you go back?

How's indenting/tabbing handled? "x spaces" or a tab? I'm wondering if you have any funny indenting/tabbing behaviour.

There's a few things that i think you're reacting to (i think, because i've had similar feelings, but i could totally be wrong).

The first is that Verdana is really nicely hinted, which means that, unlike most other fonts out there, Verdana has the advantage of always technically looking sharp.

The second is that Verdana is mostly monolinear, like Courier or Andale or any of traditional monospaces, there's only the slightest bit of stroke variation (most of it optical), so you get style but you don't get the distraction (onscreen) of stroke modulation

The third is that most proportional fonts have a comparatively larger pitch, so you get more characters in each line, which is also what you start seeing in 'next gen monospaces' that seem to make better use of their allotted horizontal space (and seem less wonky in general).

The last, and arguably most important, is that almost all proportional fonts (verdana included) have got style. It's hard to emphasize enough that most of the arguments for Consolas or Inconsolata or Liberation or ____ are largely due to the fact that those fonts have an overt aesthetic agenda, which is sometimes not apparent in first-gen monospaces (although, to be fair, they and their brethren are stylized, it's just that we've grow numb to it)

I'm personally a monospace sorta person (i like fedra mono)--there are some really nice (alas, non-free) monos out there to choose between that are more fun to use than the more stoic traditional monospaces. Part of why proportional fonts are appealing is that we rarely need monospace fonts anymore: their use is largely vestigial (and aesthetic-driven) and also that many programming languages (python et al) often have highly literate code that benefits from typefaces designed with legibility in mind.

So i'm just sayin, i respect where you're coming from, but don't dismiss monos out of hand. There are nice ones which are coincidentally monospace, but aren't as frumpy or harsh as the monospace fonts that are typically advertised as 'best programming fonts.'

I bought The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup which had program code written in a proportional font. It is absolutely a nightmare to read. When using a proportional font, I have "jitter" issues as the cursor scrolls down and keeps switching places on the screen. I have to navigate vertically then make the horizontal adjustments.

I do all my programming in Source Insight and it lets you switch between monospaced and proportional fonts with a keystroke. I find it easier to read code in proportional mode but find editing is best done in monospace mode.

I don't want to start an editor war but Source Insight is the best editor I've ever used and that includes Emacs and Vim. Yes I said it :-)

Agreed. I find Lucida Grande a good programming font too.

Would love to see a list of top 10 proportional programming fonts.

There is some discussion on this bug report, and a possible temporary fix. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=69253

Just nit picking, but your misspelling of Envy Code R (I read it as "envy coder") to Code Envy R gave me a deja-vu. And I found your comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1287909. You are not alone there, though :)

Me too. I think this is default on the Ubuntu terminal. I liked it so much I brought it over to my Windows computer at work and use it with Putty.

I'm a committed 6x10 user. 6x13 wouldn't give me enough lines on the screen.

Glad I'm not the only one who actually likes blocky bitmap monospace fonts for programming.

I wish I could say why though. It just feels nice and computer-y. Maybe the pixels remind me of bits.

I keep trying others and always end up going back to 6x13. It's the perfect font when working on a notebook.

At work I have a larger display that sits farther away, and am running windows. Consolas is easier on the eyes there with two Emacs buffers side-by-side (at "108" Emacs font height).

I came across the 5x13 font (https://github.com/chneukirchen/5x13) and wanted to try it on my netbook. For some reason spaces come out as hatched boxes for me. The font itself looks promising but needs many changes (some of which I've figured enough out to make; but I don't know what to do with the space).

> ... all except Visual Studio 2010 ...

I'm also a fan of Dina and it's been the first change I make to any IDE or programming text editor I use since I found it years ago. I recently came across this when I started using IntelliJ IDEA and needed a TTF font: http://chrisrickard.blogspot.com/2010/03/dina-font-for-visua... . Quote from the page:

    *bonus* I found that this font can also be used with any .NET application
    (WPF or Windows Forms) that normally can't handle raster fonts.

Screenshot: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_n07tuwMNUu8/S603jWw9ZVI/AAAAAAAAAK...

And for anyone else curious here's the original font:

http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Jibz/Dina/

I too use Dina (based of Proggy). I tried a lot of different fonts and there's a few on this top 10 list that wouldn't work for me but since I found Dina, I haven't searched for another font or made another change.

I agree. I switched to Meslo too (based on Menlo). Menlo LG S DZ which has a dot in the middle of the 0. Looks like the dot comes from Mensch.

https://github.com/andreberg/Meslo-Font/issues/1

I'm trying this out at the moment (14 pt S DZ) but the current line marking in VIM for example looks weird because there is more whitespace on the bottom of the characters than at the top.

Other than that it is a welcome improvement to Menlo regular.

This is perfect!

Eclipse has its lines of text set-solid which is seven brands of evil, so the "M" version of Meslo is a godsend.

It looks slightly more airy than menlo. I'll try it on for a week. One day is not enough to decide.

Thanks for confirming this, I installed some of those and oh my they were ugly. I'll stick with Verdana for now :(

Very nice font. Just replaced Vera Sans Mono with it on my VIM configuration. Great tip.

I use Mensch too, but let's not credit Apple too much considering Menlo in turn was a fairly minor tweak of the Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. To do so would be almost as annoying as people claiming Apple created Webkit out of the blue rather than starting from an open source project, or that they created their kernel out of the blue, or their OS tools, or windowing operating systems in general were created by them, or the personal computer or the smart phone or the tablet. Apple is very good at polishing things, at integration, supply chains and marketing; extremely good, and they even have a very good record on fonts - but don't listen to Jobs' story on this or you will think we would still be using the command line for everything - however they get orders of magnitude too much credit when it comes to innovation.

Agreed. I use this font in vim at work because (believe or not) it seems to be the sharpest on my crappy LCD monitor at work. I was using Bitstream Vera Sans Mono before though which I love.

+1 for DSM.

I use the solarized vim/terminal color scheme so from syntax highlighting I can tell the difference between the O and 0 but I can see why it would be a problem.

Here's a version with slashed zero (there's also another version with dotted zero from the same author): http://blog.cosmix.org/2009/10/27/a-slashed-zero-droid-sans-...

i use notepad++ with Consolas under the zenburn theme, for clarity its the best, especially with long coding days

Me, too! I far prefer the density but it's probably ruining my eyes. Also, on TextMate you have to adjust the line height.

Don't think I could justify spending €170 on a font though, especially if it's not billable to a client.

Solarized is nice, but PragmataPro is vomitous. There's such a thing as too compact, and man does that qualify.

I use Consolas at 16pt, but I also do most of my work on a 2560x1600 monitor. Consolas at 14pt on my laptop.

I searched through this whole thread looking for 'alias' to see if anyone else also can't stand anti-aliased fonts for coding, and I see that there are a few of us. I also always end up back with Monaco, but 10pt black on white. Perfectly readable and easy on the eyes.

Variable-width fonts help with natural language, to detect phonemes or even words. Unfortunately, we are mostly dealing with machine language, where audio is not so important, so character-by-character reading is the norm.

That's a really impressive font actually. I don't suppose there's any kind of trial version you're aware of? I don't want to splash out that kind of money unless I'm sure I'll keep using it.

I had not realized how a font could be so much easier on ones eyes until I started using Consolas for everything. I seriously feel more productive now which I did not expect.

Unless you'd otherwise be spending your time doing something else unproductive, in which case it doesn't matter.

You reckon?

I started out using FixedSys, since it was the default on the editor I was using at the time - PFE, I think. And since taking the time to switch to the X 6x13 font (which I happened to encounter towards the end of my time at university), I must have saved enough time scrolling horizontally through other people's code to break even.

I have dicked about a bit trying out other programming fonts, it's true, but having had success the once from doing this, why not double check?

I think a better analogy is "Twiddling fonts is to programming what choosing a helmet is to car racing". An ill-fitting helmet will probably do the job just as well as a good fitting helmet, but why be uncomfortable? That said, I agree that there's a limit to how much effort you should put into font selection -- find one that you like and that works for your purposes and leave it at that.

I tried Consolas on a Mac but it wasn't aligning right. :(

I only use monospace fonts with well differentiated Ls and 1s. This is a pretty important issue to me as I was constantly making dumb mistakes, and in general it improves readability.

On another note, you probably change the default font when writing a major document in a word processor (unless your using LaTex in which case Computer Modern is often the way to go). Changing your coding font is exactly like that. People like to customize and give their system a personal flavor. Changing fonts and syntax colors is just one part of customizing a system.

90% of it is really just how purdy it is. Picking the 'right' font will make you feel better when you stare at it all day. It's like how functionally, you could compose a 6000 word essay in comic sans, but really rather not.

But in other cases, depending on your display size/setup, I guess there will be advantages to certain fonts. Now, mind you, the 10 on this list are all 'good' so you won't really see it between them, but certain monospaced fonts have letters/symbols that are more easily confused with each other... like single quote, versus the thing under the tilde (whatever its called >.<)

For me, it wasn't about a particular feature -- it was just about the feel of the two.

A couple years ago, I was doing a lot of work on both my Windows box and my Mac. I noticed that I started to regard my Mac as "soft" and "friendly", and my Windows machine (with large external monitors) was "harsh". I felt mildly stressed out working on the Windows machine, even though I would frequently switch between them sitting at the same desk.

So, on a whim, I looked up the font on the Mac (Monaco), and set it up on Putty, and (surprisingly) it made a big difference. I felt like the code I had was easier to read, and I just generally worked better.

I've since decided I like Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, but at this point it's just something I set up on new computers, with no thought. It's not a rational thing, but who ever says I have to feel rationally about my tools? :)

Generally speaking - most of the monospace fonts I see are totally fine and I really don't care about the differences between the 10 he mentioned as being good. But when I go to windows and run cmd.exe I'm blown away by just how ugly the font they use there is.

There's only a few things I look for in a programming font:

Monospacing And being able to see these as different glyphs easily: O0I1l

Other than that, I don't put too much though into it.

Brightens up otherwise dull days. I think that's all it is. People work better when they occasionally give their computer a makeover, and everything feels fresh.

Super fair question. Frankly, it's unlikely to ever be a big deal. Font design and choice is always a game of small details and your desire to spend time and effort on it depends on how much you care about small details.

For an art director doing print or web design, each and every single detail is vital. They are attempting to ship something as close to perfection as possible. From this grows a fantastic font market where artistic craftsmen have learned to honestly, subtly insert comfort, exoticism, 70s appeal, honesty, clarity, or any of many other subjective emotions into just a few pixels difference in the shape of letters we see all day every day.

But yeah, honestly, when coding, that stuff isn't going to kill you.

At the same time, there's a huge market of experts who have often released free monospaced fonts using the accumulated knowledge of the craft described above. It's easy to find fonts which solve the obvious problems (li1, oO0, mn) and possible to find ones that solve less obvious problems (textual color which can reduce reading stress, condensed fonts which can pack more into a line without feeling cluttered, larger x-height which can appear more inviting).

'Monospace, next question?' is really 60% of what these fonts can give you. 'Modern monospace, next question?' is probably 95%. The last 5 is just there if you care about it. Like usual, the last 5% is 500x the effort of 'Modern monospace, next question', though.

If you're staring at it for 10 hours a day, I think it's fine to want to like it.

I have a different answer than all the other replies: for me it's just about fitting as much of my code on the screen as possible. The standard xterm font is nice and compact. For every other font I've tried, if you adjust it so that it matches or beats the xterm font in terms of number of lines of code that fit on your screen and number of editor windows you can fit side by side, they are not readable. Like pretty much literally not readable. (I'm eager to be corrected if I'm wrong -- I may not have tried every font out there, but I've tried a lot of them.)

Therefore the xterm font (FixedMedium6x13) wins. But getting exactly that font in other editors like it is in xterms is not so simple:

For linux, see this comment in the current discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2584147

For osx, see my question, also in that thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2586300

Just to annoy you... that's the reason. It worked! I can't be1ieve it!