Inconsolata

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

by Cieplak • 14 years ago

156 60 14 years ago

This is by far my favorite programming font. Has been since Office 2007. You should also check out Inconsolata for Powerline, especially in Vim.

https://github.com/skwp/dotfiles/tree/master/fonts

marban• 14 years ago

Not free but i've used Pragmata over the last years. http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragmatapro.htm

raldi• 14 years ago

How to change Chrome's default (crappy) monospace font:

1. Go to chrome://settings/fonts

2. Click the dropdown for "Fixed-width font"

telemachos• 14 years ago

I love Inconsolata, except for one small thing: the curly quotation marks.

If you have that same quibble, good news: Inconsolata-dz[1]. Inconsolata with straight quotes.

[1] http://nodnod.net/2009/feb/12/adding-straight-single-and-dou...

anveo• 14 years ago

There is also Inconsolata-g[1] which is an enhanced version of Inconsolata-dz. I prefer the dotted zero among a few other changes.

[1] http://leonardo-m.livejournal.com/77079.html

gorekee• 14 years ago

I had problems with Inconsolata in PhpStorm 4. But this version works. Tanks a lot.

Adrock3• 14 years ago

I included Inconsolata in my programmatic comparison of programming fonts:

http://1overn.com/2011/01/31/iterating-on-font-pair-comparis...

Consolas vs. Inconsolata: http://1overn.com/2011/01/31/iterating-on-font-pair-comparis...

Droid Sans Mono vs. Inconsolata: http://1overn.com/2011/01/31/iterating-on-font-pair-comparis...

nnq• 14 years ago

Cool, your Consolas vs Inconsolata overlay comparison made me understand why I just love Consolas so much and have grown to hate any other fixed width font (of course, getting the right antialiasing settings for it on Linux can be a bitch sometimes)... I just like its oversized "[]", "@" and lower than standard "_" and beautiful straight quotes.

msutherl• 14 years ago

Consolas is wonderful and definitely better than Iconsolata. If you like Inconsolata, I highly recommend trying to hunt down a copy of Consolas from Windows (I did this on my Mac for awhile). These days, though, I use Meslo because it allows me to get a bit more line height in a graceful way.

Derbasti• 14 years ago

Could you do one of those for Ubuntu Mono? I would love that!

Adrock3• 14 years ago

I love Inconsolata on the printed page and it's my go-to font for code listings in LaTeX, but it wasn't really designed for display. On the screen, I prefer something with nice bitmaps at smaller sizes, like Anonymous Pro.

calinet6• 14 years ago

Yes, Anonymous Pro is the one and only for me. Beautiful at all sizes and especially small points.

Adrock3• 14 years ago

If you like Anonymous Pro and are obsessive, I have a minor tweak that fixes an issue with the bitmap version of "/":

http://1overn.com/2011/02/02/tweaking-my-favorite-programmin...

I named the modified version "Nameless Amateur," which was a big mistake as it makes Googling for it a NSFW activity.

lightyrs2• 14 years ago

I love Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Looks great at large sizes too!

oinksoft• 14 years ago

Likewise for DejaVa Sans Mono. Try as I might, I never could detect any difference between your favorite and myown.

oofabz• 14 years ago

DejaVu is a fork of Bitstream Vera which added more characters for Unicode support.

BerislavLopac• 14 years ago

I've just checked my settings, tested with Inconsolata, Consolas and Andale Pro, and returned to Vera Sans Mono. ;-)

lightyrs2• 14 years ago

I always end up doing this whenever a programming font article comes up on HN.

hollerith• 14 years ago

If you are on OS X 10.6 or 10.7 (Snow Leopard or Lion) there is a pre-installed font named Menlo which is very similar to Vera Sans Mono.

splattne• 14 years ago

Is it me or does t not match the style of the other letters?

andrewcooke2• 14 years ago

i think it's a feature that is supposed to add character. and perhaps it looks better in use (that image is pretty poorly anti-aliased, i think).

q_revert2• 14 years ago

having seen a few blogs about this in the past I tried out Inconsolata before, but always reverted back to DejaVuSansMono as I never had much luck with Inconsolata and Konsole.. specifically, the problem I have is:

http://imgur.com/a/oy0uW

the top one is Inconsolata, the bottom one DejaVu.. anyone else come across this behaviour before? I'm never sure of what to google to get it sorted.. and haven't managed to figure it out

eps• 14 years ago

Looks like a bug in Konsole to me.

mh-• 14 years ago

yes, I have seen this behavior before.. what font size were you running each at? Try changing the Inconsolata font size, I'll bet it fixes it.

if I'm right, take a look at: http://blog.typekit.com/2010/12/14/a-closer-look-at-truetype... and ctrl-f to 'delta' for a partial explanation of what's happening.

q_revert2• 14 years ago

inconsolata vs dejavu with different font sizes.. http://imgur.com/a/ycol8

inconsolata seems to act silly regardless of the font size, I guess it might be just a konsole bug seeing as the font works ok with gnome-terminal etc

ntzanos• 14 years ago

It looks like Konsole is trying to use a bold font. Inconsolata does not have a bold variant therefore there is bold emulation.

ybother• 14 years ago

I prefer Anonymous because it it's legible at low resolutions. Any font can take advantage of high resolution, it opens up a lot of freedom to the artist.

SeoxyS2• 14 years ago

I discovered Inconsolata two years ago or so, and it's been my go-to monospaced font ever since. I have it set to 11 points anti-aliased and it just looks gorgeous!

For your viewing pleasure, here is what my typical development environment looks like (anti-aliased retina 11pt Inconsolata):

http://akhun.com/seo/skitch/Screen_Shot_2012-07-19_at_10.17....

Munksgaard• 14 years ago

What theme do you use, and do you have your .emacs up somewhere?

SeoxyS2• 14 years ago

I use vim :). I made my own color Terminal theme, which isn't up anywhere.

You can find my .vimrc and the rest of my configurations over here: https://github.com/kballenegger/dotfiles/blob/dotfiles/.vimr...

Ralith• 14 years ago

That's tmux, actually. Look at the title bar.

iambvk• 14 years ago

I used to use Inconsolata ever since I came to know about it.

But, after the monospaced variant of Ubuntu font is released, I switched away from Inconsolata. It is a great font, but Ubuntu Mono is better looking for my taste.

andrewcooke2• 14 years ago

i recently switched to ubuntu on one machine. that font was one of the best parts of switching. it's amazing how much difference it makes to the feel of the system.

thiderman2• 14 years ago

I have been using Inconsolata since about a year ago. I was an avid user of tiny pixel fonts, but I felt an increasing amount of strain on my eyes. This worried me since I'm only 23, so I went out to look for bigger fonts. Pixel fonts look horrible in bigger sizes, and I was never a fan of anti-aliasing, so it took me a while before I found something I liked. Inconsolata made me switch, and I never looked back.

Screenshot for great justice! http://shot.ninjaloot.se/20120719.201001.png

3am_hackernews• 14 years ago

What OS, window manager, term and theme are you using? Looks really nice and very close to what I would want.

thiderman2• 14 years ago

Thank you! I am using Arch Linux with i3 (default config except for some keybindings) and running rxvt-unicode with tmux sessions. The top bar is a dzen2 dock with a custom script feeding it information. There is no real theme involved, but all the settings on display can be found at my GitHub account.

https://www.archlinux.org

http://www.i3wm.org

http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/rxvt-unicode.html

http://tmux.sourceforge.net/

https://github.com/robm/dzen

https://github.com/daethorian/config

jamesaguilar• 14 years ago

I tried this and loved it, but it lacks one of the two prime weights (bold, ital), can't remember which. That hurts it because a lot of code editing for me takes place in an environment where all three weights are used, and it kills the monospaced-ness.

Paul_S2• 14 years ago

No truetype font will replace a pixel perfect bitmapped font. Not until we have displays with ridiculous dpi. And until that happens you can't beat terminus as it's perfect.

Yes, I know it's meant for print, but people here mention it in the context of using it on the screen as well.

robin_reala• 14 years ago

Not until we have displays with ridiculous dpi.

3 years will see the majority of new computers on ‘retina’ displays.

LeonidasXIV• 14 years ago

That means we get back to what we had in 2005 with the T42's 1600x1200 15" screen?

ars2• 14 years ago

Try dina: http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Jibz/Dina/

Paul_S2• 14 years ago

Looks like it comes only in a windows format and in a very limited number of sizes. But thanks for the rec.

to3m• 14 years ago

I'm afraid you have been misinformed. The perfect bitmap font is the famous 6x13 xterm font from X-Windows. This is a simple statement of incontrovertible fact.

tallpapab• 14 years ago

What I'd like to see (Monty Python Gumby) is some dates on his web page. Maybe a GitHub page. I got Incosolata a few years ago and have been using it since, but he says he's working on it. When was the last update?

dtbx• 14 years ago

I like M+, a font designed by a japanese.

In particular, I use M+ 1m regular. I like it because I'm shortsighted, so when I put it in 14pt, I can see very clearly.

kellishaver• 14 years ago

I love this font. Someone on here recommended it to me last year when I was in need of a fixed-width font that looked decent at larger point sizes (I was dealing with some cataract issues at the time).

wreckimnaked• 14 years ago

Ricty(http://save.sys.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~yusa/fonts/ricty.html) user here, I love how it it is just enough "serified" for better readability

kodisha• 14 years ago

I tried Inconsolata few times, but i could never stick with it...

My history of programming fonts goes something like this:

- i know they were mono

- Dejavu sans / vera sans mono

- proggy clean (back in the days of low resolution, i really loved it )

(switched to mac)

- monaco

- andale mono

Once in a while i try some other font, but i keep returning to Andale Mono. (best MS product ever? :)

greyfade• 14 years ago

I like this font, but its hinting on Linux sometimes makes it unusable. I keep jumping between Inconsolata-g, Clean, Consolas, Anka/Coder, and Andale Mono, because each one of them has something that just bugs the hell out of me.

I'm still looking for a font that has clean hinting at 8pt on Linux, that doesn't have absolutely atrocious features, and that has a reasonable number of symbols on the mathematical and non-Latin Unicode planes. Fontconfig with Infinality patches helps, but not enough.

BadassFractal• 14 years ago

Been a really happy DejaVu Sans Mono 10 user for a while now. It was tough choosing between that and Inconsolata.

scotty79• 14 years ago

Inconsolata does not look crisp at small sizes for me in Ubuntu. Liberation Mono 9 is better for me.

jwr• 14 years ago

Inconsolata has been my font of choice for many years now whenever I have to use antialiased fonts or when I want a large font. It beats all others for readability.

For most of my programming/terminal work, however, I use Proggy Clean, non-antialiased. The amount of context you can put on the screen this way is amazing. Also, once you use a well-designed non-antialiased font for a while, you will have a hard time going back to the fuzzy outlines of vector fonts. I think a retina-quality display will obviate the need for fonts like Proggy Clean, though.

graue• 14 years ago

If anyone uses Windows here, note that this font is going to look much worse for you than it does on Mac or Linux. I use the Inconsolata-g variant[1] on Xubuntu and love it, but to my chagrin, it looked wretched on the Windows machine at work: jagged edges everywhere.

The Google Web Fonts version of the original Inconsolata — which has apparently been "properly hinted for Windows"[2] — was a major improvement, but still lacks the buttery smoothness the font has on Linux.

This discrepancy seems to be due to a Linux font setting that lets you choose "slight", "medium" or "full" hinting, with slight being the default. If I choose full, I get the more squared-off, digital-looking font appearance I associate with Windows. I don't have a Mac, but based on screenshots in this thread, the appearance is the same as Linux.

Anyway, good to see Inconsolata getting some attention. A very well-made font.

[1] http://leonardo-m.livejournal.com/77079.html

[2] http://pgl.yoyo.org/bits/tech/inconsolata-cleartype-raph-lev...

swah• 14 years ago

I'm guessing this is here again just because Matt Cutts tweeted it?

lazyjeff• 14 years ago

Inconsolata is great for writing URLs in papers because they don't have that blocky look, and they don't stick out on the page from being twice as wide as your serif fonts.

hgimenez• 14 years ago

recent awesome discovery: you can use Inconsolata in your google docs to paste in code samples and whatnot, available from the Add Fonts item in the font picker.

zmonkeyz• 14 years ago

I currently use this on my 3270 emulator ;)

Inconsolata

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