However, right now, my new favorite font is Menlo that came with Snow Leopard. It's another variant of Bitstream Vera and it seems to work much better at smaller font sizes. Which is great for limited screen sizes (such as 1280x800 on a smaller laptop).
Wow, I hadn't noticed Menlo, thanks. I've been using Bitstream Vera Sans Mono for a while but I don't like how faint the hyphen is with anti-aliasing when I'm coding in haml – a problem that Menlo fixes.
I recently had one of those "time to tweak my environment" days where I spent the entire day trying out monospaced fonts (DejaVu Sans Mono, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Envy, Terminus... everything I could find) in various color schemes in multiple editors (Win). I've now pretty much set any program where I need a monospace font to Liberation Mono 10pt.
However, I think Consolas looks better if I'm trying to fit more onto the screen. It looks better at smaller sizes than Liberation.
So I've settled on using 2 editors most the time with pretty similar features (Notepad++ & Programmer's Notepad), one loaded with Liberation Mono, the other with Consolas for files where I'd like to squeeze more lines in and keep decent readability.
Maybe there's a better way of doing things, but I like having two sorta different workspaces that I can quickly open.
Though, actually, you don't have to use the Terminal. You can just right-click the XML File Format Converter installer, "Show Package Contents," and navigate to the font installer package.
Debatable. Zero is typically narrower than uppercase O, so it is trivial to distinguish them even without the slash that merely adds to the visual noise.
Sure, but that assumes that you have a 0 and an O sitting right next to each other to compare. That said, the reason I don't like dotted-0 is because I feel it's too noisy. I think a slash is the right balance...but that's me ;-)
Agreed. All of the characters are perfectly balanced and fine-tuned. For example, #, /, and <> all look wonderful in code. Monaco messes that up, especially with /.
Takes a little bit to get used to using a serif monospace font though.
I used to switch fonts between different ones all the time. About a year ago, I found Envy Code R. I haven't switched since. Easy to read, easy to tell the difference between zero and O, paren and curly brace, etc...
I finally got around to spending a couple of hours configuring emacs 23 for the Mac. If I had fully realized that it supported native fonts now, and that Inconsolata would make me this happy, I'd have upgraded months ago.
I have used Schumacher Clean for ages, and find it awesome. Not sure it's available on Mac/Win, but it's very readable and clean (...). I mostly write LaTeX and C/C++ in Emacs on dark grey background.
i agree, but did you notice that monaco 9 point without anti-aliasing in this article looks very similar? which seems like good news to me, because if schumacher disappears then there's something to fall back to...
True, monaco9 looks a lot like clean12. However, I use a 13point version for coding. It's a little taller and for that reason, in my opinion, clearer. If schumacher disappears, I should look for monaco 10pts, as I can't find it on my linux box...
http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
Which is a variant of Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:
http://www.gnome.org/fonts/
However, right now, my new favorite font is Menlo that came with Snow Leopard. It's another variant of Bitstream Vera and it seems to work much better at smaller font sizes. Which is great for limited screen sizes (such as 1280x800 on a smaller laptop).