

The Best Programming Fonts - ajbatac
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/05/01/top-10-programming-fonts/

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jemmons
Number one is Arial? Way to blow all credibility right up front.

~~~
blogimus
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.

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riobard
I guess platform/rendering engine difference should be taken into
consideration when choosing the "best" fonts. Same font is usually rendered
very differently on different platforms with anti-aliasing on. For example,
Monaco looks fantastic on Mac, but just so-so on Windows/Linux. (Though for
bitmap fonts this seems not a real issue.)

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jrockway
Don't use Vera, use DejaVu. It's the same font, but with many more Unicode
characters. (λ looks much nicer after I made the switch.)

Link: <http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page>

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bitwize
Terminus. LispM font.

Smoothed blended TrueType programming fonts are for clove-cigarette-smoking
nancy boys.

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dimitar
How about the X11 "fixed" font and my favorite - "terminus"?

Fixed, by the way is the font you see when you start xterm in most
environments. Hold Ctrl and the RMB while the mouse cursor is in a xterm
window and you can see it in different sizes

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wastedbrains
I am a big fan of Anonymous, it is currently my emacs code font.

<http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymous.html>

~~~
puns
+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.

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yan
It's not mentioned, but I _love_ Pragmata[1]. It's expensive, but gorgeous and
very usable. And I stand by what I said about it earlier:
<http://twitter.com/yan_i/status/1442859670>

[1] <http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragma.htm>

~~~
weaksauce
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?

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neovive
++ for Dina. It's an excellent programming font and looks great even at 8pt.
It allows you to see much more code per screen.

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socratees
Arial? I've tried using non monospace fonts for code. They've never worked out
for me.

~~~
jrockway
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.

------
Zev
Espresso Mono gets my vote nowadays. Prior to that, I was using Consolas for
the prior year or so.

I _think_ I used Monaco or Inconsolata before that. Can't really remember.

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pavelludiq
I used to like Monaco, but its parentheses are kind of annoying if you program
in a lisp like language, or if you need to nest a lot of parentheses. Now im
using dejavu sans mono.

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_giu
my favorite programming font (and I think it is a pity that the article
doesn't mention it): Envy Code R ([http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-
code-r-preview-7-cod...](http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-
preview-7-coding-font-released))

I just love this font! it's such a beautiful piece of font-design and I only
can recommend you to try it out!

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blackman
I like triskweline <http://www.netalive.org/tinkering/triskweline/>

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utx00
inconsolata

droid-sans mono

~~~
jemmons
Both great!

I would add Envy Code R: [http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-
preview-7-cod...](http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-
preview-7-coding-font-released)

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nimbix
I'm perfectly happy with Courier New. Most editors on windows use it by
default and I never felt the need to change it.

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Semiapies
I've been happily using Proggy Clean for a while. It's even surprisingly
readable printed at low point size.

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

~~~
Semiapies
Mm, works nicely for me at 1280 x 1024 a monitor. Also quite reasonable-
looking printed.

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badger7
Grunties's comment FTW. "monospace good, non-monospace bad, all other
considerations irrelevant. Next?"

~~~
_giu
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!

