There's a certain style of programming font, I think due to narrow strokes and sharp curves that I at least find universally ugly and often hard to read. From this list Monoid, Iosveka, Anonymous Pro, and Share Tech Mono at least fall into that category. I think it's meant to be sort of a callback to bitmap fonts? I know the Linux console font (terminus) looks similar, but that's clearly due to technical limitations. Is there something wrong with my font rendering, or are there people actually liking this style? If you do like this style, what OS do you use? I'm wondering if there's a common trend where such fonts render better on macOS or something.
I've been using Anonymous Pro as my primary code font for at least 5 years now.
I came to Anonymous Pro through the path of previously using tewi [0]. I was big on the whole linux customization / "ricing" scene in my early years of university, and because of how my desk was set up, i was close enough to my computer to be able to read it. I ran Arch, with tewi, at a 9 point font size. I just liked how it looked.
Eventually my desk setup changed and having such a small font was no longer viable. I went with Anonymous Pro because I found it to be similar, but also easier to read at larger sizes. For a while I coded primarily in vim, so maybe there was something about just setting it once in the terminal config and having what I needed. I also picked it because patched versions existed with powerline symbols, which I was into at the time.
I now primarily use VS Code on Windows, but I still use Anonymous Pro. I think the narrow strokes and the sharp cruves that you dislike are actually easier for me to read. They give characters a kind of crisp shape, and I find that helpful in distinguishing which characters are which. When I look at the colleciton of fonts, ones like Cascadia, Ubuntu Mono, and especially Nova Mono all look awful to me, because of how rounded they are. I'm also in the crowd of people who dislike ligatures in programming fonts
If I were to pick any of the fonts from this list to try, I would probably pick Hack or Noto Mono for something a bit more robust, or Source Code Pro for something similar to the slenderness of Anonymous Pro. But I think the more important thing is knowing what you like and picking one and settling on it. It surprised me when I went back to my dotfiles and I was looking at screenshots, just how long I've been using the same font. But it makes things easy.
I love all those fonts! Right now I'm using Iosevka Term at Medium weight since I can cram a reasonable amount of code in horizontal space and the style looks very appealing to me.
This is with monitors at around ~130DPI. For regular old 96 DPI monitors I used tewi, a very small bitmap font.
I'm running Linux so most things are rendering on FreeType, here's a screenshot of Iosevka Term with some random youtube-dl code: https://i.imgur.com/qQHmOX2.png
I still haven't found a font I like better than Terminus. I've tried scores and keep coming back to it. I find most fonts to take up way to much horizontal space compared to Terminus. I might try a couple of those just to see, but I'll probably just end up back on Terminus.
