
Adobe's Source Code Pro Font - pykello
http://opensourcehacker.com/2012/10/07/go-pro-and-your-eyes-will-thank-you/
======
ary
I would be remiss not to point out Inconsolata. It's perfect (IMHO) for code,
terminals, and email.

<http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html>

~~~
joshkaufman
I'm a huge fan of Inconsolata. There's a variant called Inconsolata-g that's
even better: <http://leonardo-m.livejournal.com/77079.html>

~~~
guptaneil
Thanks for that! This font looks gorgeous in Terminal. I was just struggling 2
days ago to find a better font because I was fed up with the system defaults.

------
macrael
I've recently switched to coding in a proportional width font (right now I'm
using Verdana) and I'm never going back. I've yet to be bothered by things not
lining up perfectly like things can in fixed width fonts, and overall my code
feels more readable and easy on the eyes. I recommend giving it a try.

~~~
lsb
What sort of code are you writing? What languages are you using?

~~~
CJefferson
While I'm not the parent, I can comment on this too.

I program in Python, C, C++ and Java. In all these languages I prefer a
proportional font. However I had to stop, mainly because the editors I want to
use (Sublime text 2 at the moment) don't support proportional fonts.

~~~
cowsaysoink
Proportional fonts seem to work for me in ST2 (<http://i.imgur.com/ZLZWP.png>)
I just put this into the config:

    
    
        "font_face": "Verdana"
    

Though I may be missing something.

~~~
Stratoscope
You're not missing anything. I'm using Georgia in ST2 via the same font_face
setting you're using. Works great!

------
whalesalad
I tried to get down with Source Code Pro, but it's such a radical departure
from the popular monospaced fonts like Consolas, Inconsolata, Menlo, Monaco
(classic!), etc... that I couldn't do it =(

It's interesting how much of your productivity comes from the subtle/indirect
recognition of things. Changing something as trivial your color scheme or font
can take a good chunk of time for adjustment.

I'm a huge fan of Ubuntu's monospaced font and use it on my Mac with Sublime.

<http://wsld.me/JzYm> (Ubuntu Mono, 16pt)

~~~
iambvk
+1 for Ubuntu Mono. IMO it looks better than Inconsolata.

~~~
StavrosK
Am I the only one who uses DejaVu Sans Mono?

~~~
anonova
Nope, DejaVu Sans Mono is my preferred monospaced font too.

------
artursapek
I've never understood why people code on dark backgrounds with such thick,
fuzzy fonts. I find it extremely hard to read and have instead grown used to
coding on an off-white background. Fonts are just rendered much thinner in a
dark color on a light background (or at least, they seem to be). There's more
space between legs and inside the o's in the letters. I find it much easier to
read.

I've spent many hours trying to figure out how to convince Vim and/or OS X to
lighten up on their font rendering. For some reason the only place I've been
able to pull this off is Drracket which I just use for a class, and which _has
an option to do it_. I've never been able to pull it off in my standard coding
environment. I can't understand why that option isn't available anywhere else,
or on an operating system level.

This is Monaco 12pt in Drracket and Vim, with that Drracket font smoothing
option at the bottom: <http://i.imgur.com/Va0ZN.png>

Is there a good reason there's such little control over font rendering, at
least on Mac?

~~~
tuxracer
OSX font rendering is optimized for high ppi displays (128+ ppi). If you try
to look at screenshots of OSX font rendering on low-ppi displays (i.e. typical
Windows laptop with 15" display at 1366 x 768) it's going to look incredibly
fuzzy.

On the other hand, ClearType is optimized for low-ppi displays. If you try to
view text rendered with ClearType on a high ppi display (128+ ppi) it will
look incredibly thin because ClearType attempts to force straight font lines
into a single row or column of pixels which is incredibly thin at such a high
ppi. That's the very thing that makes ClearType fonts look much crisper on
very low ppi displays.

tl;dr OSX font rendering is much more readable on 128+ (or even 220) ppi
displays.

~~~
cochese
Is this true? Not even the Thunderbolt Display is 128+

~~~
mitsche
I think this comes down to personal preference. I am on a 24 inch screen with
1080 lines and I still prefer reading text in OS X to Windows on it. On my
shabby laptop, not so much.

------
rll
To install on Linux use the OTF files from
[https://github.com/downloads/adobe/Source-Code-
Pro/SourceCod...](https://github.com/downloads/adobe/Source-Code-
Pro/SourceCodePro_FontsOnly-1.010.zip) and put them in
/usr/share/fonts/opentype

I still prefer Ubuntu Mono though

~~~
jarek-foksa
On most distros third-party fonts can be installed locally in ~/.fonts/

------
rbanffy
Since my Favorite Terminal of All Time is the IBM 3278, I cannot possibly
resist mentioning the font I built upon x3270's bitmap:

<https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font>

Yesterday, I moved all my terminals to the narrow version.

~~~
qznc
Are there screenshots available?

~~~
rbanffy
Now there is:

<https://raw.github.com/wiki/rbanffy/3270font/emacs.png>

edit: corrected URL and added it to the README file.

------
dgesang
Here is another nice comparison of 24 monospace fonts in one picture:
<http://hostpicturefree.com/images/prograpup.png>

~~~
drivebyacct2
Rendered on a mac by the looks of it.

------
hythloday
None-one's mentioned it so I want to point out Anonymous Pro, pretty much the
first thing I install on every dev machine.

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

~~~
tiziano88
After years of using Terminus on every single machine, I'm now switching to
Anonymous Pro, and I'm liking it very much so far... Maybe I'll give Source
Code Pro a try though, and see how it compares to them :)

------
cek
I pulled Source Code Pro out of brackets a few weeks ago and loved it in
Sublime, VS, and ConEMU on Windows and iTerm2 on the Mac. Then someone pointed
me at Envy Code R [1]...

I find it much more pleasing with the benefit of great differentiation between
0 O etc...

[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)

------
vinayan3
I'm switching from Consolas to Source Code Pro Font!This font works in Emacs
on Mac OS X!

Let the fixed width font war begin. Apple Vs. Microsoft vs. Adobe.

~~~
tangue
Yes, it looks really great in Emacs <http://imgur.com/7rBbP> I just find the
black font a bit too heavy, but everything else is fine.

~~~
yoklov
At the risk of destroying your productivity for the day, you can probably fix
that annoying line over your line numbers (that is, <http://imgur.com/GhaNq>)
by messing with your fringe-mode variable. I think I remember its presence
having something to do with a conflict between fringe-mode and linum-format.

~~~
tangue
Thanks ! I've been searching a long time for a fix for this. I switched linum-
format to " %d " and this is clearly better.

------
mietek
I like it, but it's too wide. My top font choice is PragmataPro:

<http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragmatapro.htm>

Some sample screenshots from OS X:

<http://i.imgur.com/oxhSg.png> (white background)

<http://i.imgur.com/M0ZJz.png> (black background)

~~~
kibwen
PragmataPro really is a beautiful font. At first I was concerned that the
larger line-height was a poor tradeoff for the decreased width, but it's so
much more readable at lower sizes than e.g. DejaVu (my prior font of choice)
that I've actually _gained_ rows on my screen without sacrificing readability.

My only remaining concern is that the hypen isn't vertically centered with
many of the other symbols, making -= and -> look awkward.

~~~
mietek
The hyphen problem is fixed in the most recent version!

    
    
        CHANGES FROM 0.8 TO 0.81
        edited by Fabrizio Schiavi 2012-06
    
          * dashrockets
            ->
            <-
            <=
            =========> 0%
            >=
            +=
            -=
            *= 
            +--------+--------+--------+
            are horizontally aligned 
      
          * | ¦ "bar" and "brokenbar" are now designed to be overlapped between two lines of text
            | ¦ (useful for iTerm2, tmux 1.6., Terminal.app and others)
      
          * horizontal strokes of the letter Nun (U+05E0) is a bit shorter, 
            to help make it more distinct from Kaph (U+05DB)
      
          * Italic weight is TrueType handhinted
      
          * Bold Italic weight is TrueType handhinted
      
          * added an entire Unicode block: 
            2100-214F Letterlike Symbols to the Regular weight
      
          * added these letters from the block 
            1D400-1D7FF Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols 
            to the Regular weight:
       
        Amathdoublestruck, Bmathdoublestruck, Dmathdoublestruck, 
        Emathdoublestruck, Fmathdoublestruck, Gmathdoublestruck, 
        Imathdoublestruck, Jmathdoublestruck, Kmathdoublestruck, 
        Lmathdoublestruck, Mmathdoublestruck, Omathdoublestruck, 
        bmathdoublestruck, dmathdoublestruck, emathdoublestruck, 
        imathdoublestruck, jmathdoublestruck, Bmathboldfraktur, 
        Cmathboldfraktur, Dmathboldfraktur, Emathboldfraktur, Fmathboldfraktur, 
        Gmathboldfraktur, Hmathboldfraktur, Imathboldfraktur

~~~
kibwen
Wow, I must have completely glossed over the notification email. Thanks a
million!

------
tsahyt
Looks good. However, nothing's going to stop me using TheSansMono[1]. I've
discovered this font a while ago and have never looked back. I like the look
and all the characters that might look similar have been worked on in order to
be easily distiguishable, like the capital O and the number 0, the lowercase l
and 1, and so on. Since it's my terminal font it's really the main font on my
system and so far it's worked for everything.

[1] <http://www.lucasfonts.com/fonts/thesansmono/>

------
ogai
With all respect, I consider Terminus better, among other things because it is
more compact and more readable

~~~
enduser
I've been using Terminus for years. I've tried several times to get into
"pretty" anti-aliased fonts, but nothing beats hard, sharp edges for a long
day of programming. I specifically use Terminus with 16 pxlsize on a 15.6"
1920x1080 screen and find that delightful.

Coding with dark text on a white background is much easier on the eyes, too,
unless you have a screen that won't let you turn down the brightness.

Pro tip: hold up a white sheet of paper in your well-lit work environment.
Adjust your screen brightness to match the brightness of the piece of paper.
Your screen should not be brighter than your work environment.

Super pro tip: work outside. Get a professional laptop with a matte screen,
one of those lightweight "antigravity" chairs, and find a nice place to work
outdoors. A 12x24" piece of wood makes a good lap desk if you need to use a
mouse and fits well over the armrests of all of the outdoor chairs I have
worked in.

------
ck2
SourceCodePro is too wide or has too much horizontal spacing for me.

DejaVu Sans Mono can be better in some environments <http://dejavu-
fonts.org/wiki/>

I also discovered I like the new Ubuntu Mono <http://font.ubuntu.com/>

except it has too much vertical spacing, but I hope to find a way to easily
edit that someday

~~~
phylofx
> SourceCodePro is too wide or has too much horizontal spacing for me.

I think so, too. At least compared to Consolas which I use and prefer.

~~~
mistercow
The horizontal spacing of Consolas and Source Code Pro are almost identical.
The _vertical_ spacing of SCP is much greater, but you're more likely to be
able to adjust that in your editor anyway.

------
px1999
While not for me (I love Consolas too much), it's great that we're starting to
see some useful fonts under permissive licenses (and from big names like Adobe
and Google). I remember back in the day when there were only a handful of
fonts that had a license that a) allowed redistribution and b) weren't GPLed.

------
cabirum
Worth noting the character set is lacking compared to other fonts such as
Consolas or Ascender Uni.

There's too much attention for 0 vs O's and too little for unicode coverage.
Personally, I never understood the whole character differentiation thing when
most modern editors/IDEs feature syntax highlighting and checking.

------
soapbeard
Ive been using the VGA font since I started coding borland IDEs in DOS. I just
cant find any other font that seems as easy to read. There is even a version
of it with lots of unicode characters added.

<http://www.inp.nsk.su/~bolkhov/files/fonts/univga/index.html>

When I got a retina macbook the resolution meant each pixel of the font was 4
on the display instead of 1 so I tried and failed to find a substitute again.
I ended up using fontforge to double the resolution of the font and smoothed
it out by hand with some extra pixels. I like it even more now.

------
nnq
...would love to see a comparison like this
[http://1overn.com/2011/01/31/iterating-on-font-pair-
comparis...](http://1overn.com/2011/01/31/iterating-on-font-pair-
comparisons/consolasinconsolata-2/for) Consolasa vs Adobe Source Code Pro and
also with Inconsolata (though for now I'm using Adobe's font simply for the
fact that in sublime text 2 on xubuntu lts both Consolas and Inconsolata
render as white squares instead of letters - couldn't figure out it's some
weird encoding issue or dog knows what, as in other apps it works great)

------
vladev
I installed the ttf version in Arch Linux and it looks awful. I guess it's
freetype2's fault.

Update: I bit the bullet and installed the Infinality patchset. The result is
astonishing...

~~~
neeee
<http://goput.it/5gi.png> Was going to recommend freetype- and fontconfig-
infinality, seems like i was too late.

------
Jach
Since this is just turning into the "name your favorite mono-font" thread, I
prefer Bitstream Vera Sans Mono Roman:
<http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Bitstream-Vera-Sans-Mono> (My old favorite
used to be Courier New Bold.)

------
acabal
It's reminiscent of DejaVu Sans Mono, the Free coding font I've been using and
liking lately.

------
ttjervaag
A bit wide for my tastes in MacVim. My font of choice lately has been PT Mono.
<http://www.paratype.com/public/> I highly recommend giving it a try!

------
bkorte
I love Source Code Pro - I keep my editor font size quite large (17-18px
depending on the font) and the light variant of Source Code Pro is perfect for
the large size.

------
skibrah
IMO, using light colored type on a dark background is relieves more eyestrain
than any particular font could.

------
jnazario
heh. i tend to lump font geeks in with grammar nazis as people who get worked
up over the littlest things. while i never understood the reasons why people
seem to go to war over fonts - witness the wrath against comic sans - i do
appreciate a pretty font and the links in this discussion.

serifs unite!

------
tehwalrus
on my (now quite old) 13" macbook pro, I have to dial down the font size on my
terminal to fit enough info on the screen.

I'd got used to Monaco, but this makes everything so much clearer. I've been
using it since this article came up, not yet been tempted to switch back.

------
RexRollman
I really like using Tamsyn, a bitmap font, for my Xterms. I just like the way
it looks.

------
xbryanx
I'm a huge fan of Panic Sans. Ripped it out of Coda and use it in Vim and my
terminals.

------
mvts
I tried it and it looks all blurred in my text editor.

~~~
zokier
did you install otf or ttf version? otf rendered worse in my case than ttf.

------
biturd
Where in the heck do you download this? I can go to github but I have to
compile it, which needs "makeotf", and I don't have that on OS X. At least not
right now.

~~~
nieve
The section titled "Pre-built font binaries" in the README links to the
download location, but it's also the standard download location on github
(right-hand side, below the clone URL and above the last commit box):
<https://github.com/adobe/Source-Code-Pro/downloads>

------
praptak
Mucking with console/IDE fonts is the ultimate waste of time. Please stop
doing it. It won't enhance your productivity. You have been warned.

------
perlpimp
thank you - it made quite a difference on high density thinkpad display.

------
drivebyacct2
I've been using this in elementary OS. Between that and using agnoster in zsh,
I'm in nerd heaven.

<http://i.imgur.com/FoFUg.png>

Actually, between elementary OS's font rendering settings, great terminal
support and unix/linux tools, I'm spending basically every second on my MBA
inside my eOS VM.

~~~
whalesalad
Your prompt is _awesome_ , mind sharing? And actually you have some
interesting config going on with Sublime. The dots next to the files? Is that
a source control flag or something?

Re-read and realized you mention the theme, link for others who are curious:
<https://gist.github.com/3712874>

~~~
drivebyacct2
zsh + oh-my-zsh + 'agnoster' theme (agnoster is now included in oh-my-zsh).

The dots are unsaved files (usually they're files that are open that I've
renamed/deleted and thus it marks them as unsaved).

The ST2 theme is "Aqua/Monokai Aqua"

(EDIT: Note, that prompt looks AWFUL in Terminal.app/iTerm2.app. It can be
made to look nice if you adjust the palette color settings for your emulator,
fortunately, this screenshot is with Gnome-terminal's Tango palette.).

~~~
whalesalad
Awesome! I use oh-my-zsh so i'll give her a spin.

------
dakimov
Wow, Adobe. An open-sourced font. I cannot believe in such a miracle. I am
truly amazed. One of the main proprietary capitalist freak companies decided
to go opensource on what? - on fonts - one of the most closed and
commercialized areas. Somebody has triggered some magic switch that turns the
world into a slightly better place.

The font is not that good though. In Windows it is rendered too wide. Does not
seem to be able to replace my current fav Segoe UI Mono that I find more
readable.

But now it is a completely different story: we have the source codes! Let's go
edit some fonts the way we like!

------
derleth
Terminus does the same thing:

<http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/>

> Version 4.38 contains 879 characters, covers about 120 language sets and
> supports ISO8859-1/2/5/7/9/13/15/16, Paratype-PT154/PT254, KOI8-R/U/E/F,
> Esperanto, many IBM, Windows and Macintosh code pages, as well as the IBM
> VGA, vt100 and xterm pseudographic characters.

