The Best Programming Fonts

The fonts are listed in alphabetical order.

But still, as stated in the article:

"It can be a little difficult to distinguish between uppercase i / lowercase L and nested single/double quotes but that can be said of many proportional fonts."

For source code editing, I'll stick to a monospaced font myself.

Agreed. If a new person starts working with me and they are not using a fixed width font, I immediately question their sanity and their skills.

+1 for Anonymous. It's a great font to use on OS X, especially if you're using light font on a dark background, as OS X tends to render the fonts much heavier and blurrier with antialiasing. Anonymous remains fairly crisp.

Wow. 90 euro for a font is pricey.

It looks nice. What makes it better than the other programming fonts? or is it a general feeling when you use it?

I think it might be dependent on what language you use. In Perl, alignment is very important, as you have a lot of code that looks like:

   my $foo = Foo->new(
      named_initargs => 'go here',
      and_also       => 'here',
   );

(There are various technical reasons to avoid this style, but I think it looks too nice to avoid.)

As a result, a non-monospaced font would be a nightmare.

However, perhaps if you are using a language where everything is positional (Java, C), then maybe it doesn't matter:

    Foo foo = new Foo(args, go, here,
        and, if, you, run, out, of, room,
        perhaps, they, can, be, written,
        like, this);

Note that the only alignment is the initial indentation; one space is always as wide as another space, so a variable-width font won't mess anything up.

Obviously if you are using Haskell or Python, you will care even more about alignment, and hence will want a monospaced font. You will also want a monospaced font in your terminal emulator, as most console apps depend on all glyphs being equally wide.

Both great!

I would add Envy Code R: http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-cod...

Same here, I love both of those fonts (except for Inconsolata's quotes).

Proggy is nice if your screen is 640x480 and CRT, but I think LCD screens and font smoothing has made that font irrelevant.

that's the same thought I had when I saw that Arial was the first item on their list. I once tried to use a non-monospaced font, but that lasted only a few seconds. it just doesn't fit!