Ask HN: What programming font do you use and why?

He compares proportional fonts with monospaced fonts for programming, and after looking at his screenshots I think I'm going to have to try it for myself.

dthakur• 17 years ago

I love CodingFontTobi (http://www.proggyfonts.com/). It's all over my system (Visual Studio, vim, cmd/cygwin etc).

grayrest• 17 years ago

Monaco at 11pt

on windows

Droid Sans Mono at 11pt with a dotted 0:

http://www.cosmix.org/software/

nek4life• 17 years ago

Here's a pretty nice list of programming fonts.

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

I like DejaVu sans and Monaco

andrewcooke• 17 years ago

schumacher clean. fixed width. easy to read. and the "a" looks like an "a" should.

keefe• 17 years ago

eclipse default because I don't particularly care

adamzochowski• 17 years ago

For code and console I love pixel fonts, so: Terminal 6px (included with all Windows) Envy Code A 7px http://damieng.com/creative/typography/envy-code-a

I can't stand blurry fonts for code (especially since, at small sizes, text looks a blotch of blur). So, if I want small fonts (such as 6pixels by 8pixels) it better be pixel crystal clear hand tweaked. A font can do anti-aliasing or LCD based sub-pixeling, but that is more towards book reading / open office, than coding.

c_allison• 17 years ago

I use Proggy Clean (Slashed Zero) 12pt from: http://www.proggyfonts.com/

tom_b• 17 years ago

second proggy fonts here

artagnon0• 17 years ago

Emacs23 XFT default. They're very pretty as it is imho.

geeksam2• 17 years ago

TextMate is currently set to Inconsolata at 15pt. Comparing screenshots of that vs. Monaco 13, it looks like the anti-aliasing adds a lot of bulk to the characters in Monaco -- Inconsolata's characters seem a little clearer to me.

But thanks for the link, seegate -- maybe I'll try a proportional font for a few days and see what I think. (=

geeksam2• 17 years ago

...except that TextMate seems not to support proportionally-spaced fonts. Never mind...

parbo• 17 years ago

DejaVu Sans Mono for me. It looks great and it's freely available for all platforms I use.

r11t• 17 years ago

I recently started using Inconsolata which looks fantastic at both large and small sizes http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html and also made the "Top 10 Programming Fonts" list here : http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts

hga• 17 years ago

Since 1993 it's been Lucida Sans Typewriter or Lucida Console; I've not found anything better to my eyes, although I'll check out this discussion.

The only issues I've found with this font family are that the differences between l and 1 and . and , can be subtle.

Ask HN: What programming font do you use and why?

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