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Comment by omellet | Hacker News Reader

False. The best programming font is Consolas.

I just tried Consolas again, inspired by this article[1]. I like how it is short and shows a lot of vertical lines. And it looks good. But after comparing it side-by-side with Monospace (default on Linux Mint), I'm sticking with it. I just like more how it looks, it seems clearer to my eyes.[2]

[1] http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts

[2] http://i.imgur.com/1FRVhWh.png

You probably need to do the illegal-in-the-US cleartype font patches to get non-half-assed linux font rendering.

I think it's completely legal by now, since the patents expired a couple of years ago (or something like that).

As I understand it, the patents on bytecode hinting have expired. I wouldn't be surprised if subpixel antialiasing was still patented.

I believe you're right. I could do that, since I don't live in the US. :)

Consolas was designed for ClearType, and for Windows. And I remember liking it very much on Visual Studio. But I'll just leave it be, I'm happy for now as it is.

Is there a legal/practical way to use Consolas on any OS other than Windows?

The last time I looked into using it on my Ubuntu workstation (which was admittedly a couple of years ago), it involved manually extracting the font files from the installer for MS's standalone PowerPoint viewer application, which was both clumsy and probably against the viewer application's license.

Honestly, Inconsolata is the better Consolas.

But I've gotten so used to the Deja Vu family of fonts being the default monospace font everywhere on Linux that I don't know if I could go back to using it again.

I use Inconsolata if I can't use Consolas, they're nearly the same.

Double false, monofur is the champion of programming fonts.

Monofur is also known as "Oh my god that's horrible why are you using that?" by my heathen work colleagues.

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