Try PTMono, a beautiful monospace font that looks like serif
google.com
google.com
Still yet to find a font that competes with Menlo/Vera Sans Mono for coding on a 900px-tall laptop screen. If anyone knows of such a thing, please let me know.
I'm using it with full hinting enabled on Ubuntu/Xubuntu and it looks just as nice as the Windows screenshots on the homepage.
The idea is to fit as many lines of text vertically, not to condense long lines horizontally. Human vision has some sort of legibility tradeoff where you can have letters that are either horizontally condensed but tall or vertically condensed but short. I am looking for something of the second kind for my main coding font.
http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymouspro.html
edit: it sort of has serifs. kind of. well more than most sans fonts
Yeah, Courier is way too thick for my tastes.
Not necessarily. This font is a monospaced hybrid of slab serif (fat serifs, regular line width) and sans serif.
See here for details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif
For Mac OS X, I suggest Luxi Mono. It does a much better job of looking like a reasonably-kerned proportional font.
For Windows, Lucida Sans Typewriter, with all antialiasing switched off. It has a nice clean look to it, and it manages to avoid being too squat.
I've so far stuck with Courier for monospace work (coding, console, etc), as I find sans-serif fonts hard to read (this is also why I don't use web fonts). I'll give this one a go for while and see how I get on.
For many years, I used non-antialiased 9 point Courier New in Windows. This is an ugly font at most other point sizes, but at 9 points it is strangely attractive, and perfectly functional - except for '1' and 'l' being pixel-for-pixel identical. Oh, and '0' and 'O' too...
The experience appears to have left me unconcerned about such minor quibbles as being able to tell one glyph from another ;) (OK, so perhaps if '+' and '-' looked the same, I'd have an issue with that.)
Nevertheless, I stand by my "vile" comment. I mean... c'mon. Just look at it. What is this, Comic Sans? It's practically an offence against nature.
The vast majority of use-cases I can think of are simply allowing you to line up the first letter of a line, or possibly an equals sign or something like that. This seems like something a tab-stop or somesuch in the editor could handle with ease, and shouldn't require sacrificing nice-looking text the rest of the time.
But yeah, I can think of a few people who AFAIK do mostly use proportional fonts, and they do just fine. I think it's mainly a path-of-least-resistance thing.
A lot of people rail against tabs; most of the time, these are people who don't understand them or have never tried to use them.
You see this debate about tabs vs. spaces in code all the time, and I've yet to hear any valid argument about why spaces are better (at least in any modern context). But there is an obvious reason that tabs are better: It's much easier to line things up, keep them aligned across different users' fonts, and realign them if you change the text to cross a tab.
I don't use tabs because of an equally obvious reason that spaces are better: because I end up padding with spaces because the tabs are too big. For example, I like having horizontally consistent parameter argument lists, like below:
class Thing {
def beep(bar: String, baz: Int, quux: Seq[String],
quuux: Map[String, String], quuuux: Int) = false
}
(Plus, my editor treats four spaces in a row as a soft tab anyway, so I don't even notice it except when I want to. Life is peachy.)
You can still achieve what you want, and even faster, by using tabs to get your subsequent parameter lines most of the way there and then padding with a couple of spaces.
The drawbacks were things like confusing lowercase L with 1 (one) in the sans-serif font I preferred, or the sort of editing where I was trying to change stuff at, say, character position 67 in a series of lines. It seems better for writing code than for editing it. Definitely give it a try if you haven't yet.
In fact, my editor of choice (Vim) assumes in many places that all displayed characters have the same width; it makes it a more consistent experience and allows you to do things on a simple console that you'd normally have to draw a complex (non-portable) GUI for.
Ubuntu Mono is nice but my eyes are not really good at detecting soft curves, I wanted something like Terminus[0] but with larger font sizes. (For some reason, I was unable to go beyond 10px with Terminus on Vim.)
Consolas comes for free with Visual Studio (probably pre-installed on Windows 7/Vista too)
Funny, inconsolata as well doesn't look that great on Windows...
It's also one of the very few monospaced fonts I've seen that has a true italic.
Really, really tired of capital I's that look like lower-case L's. These should be banished.
And the above is the only time an apostrophe makes a plural.