Hivelogic - Top Programming Fonts

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

by adambyrtek • 17 years ago

48 44 17 years ago

Great article, and awesome fonts.

But for the record, OS X now ships with a new default monospace font called Menlo which is quite nice... but it's really just Deja Vu Sans Mono with modified punctuation (most importantly though is the slash through the zero).

View it here: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2009/06/snow-leopards-new-m...

rue• 17 years ago

There is nothing that surpasses SGIscreen at 10 or 11px. As a bonus, it requires some leetness to find and use.

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

What, no love for Lucida Console? For shame, Mr Benjamin, for shame. [/typeface melodrama]

limmeau• 17 years ago

Lucida Sans Typewriter 12 for everything (on my 1280x1024 screens at work). The 75dpi bitmap font.

I even installed my own Emacs 23 with freetype support at work, but after trying EnvyCodeR and Consolas and Anonymous and what have you, I went back to lucidasanstypewriter.

palehose• 17 years ago

Call it stealing if you want, but here is a little tutorial on how to get the non-free Consolas font without buying anything from Microsoft. The font is included in a free to download dmg file from microsoft. http://www.wezm.net/2009/03/install-consolas-mac-osx/

NikkiA2• 17 years ago

They give it away with all of their Visual * Express suites, and there is even a seperate .exe installer for it, so I don't really think it counts as stealing if you use some other method to get it in an easier form.

But that's just me, I don't work for MS legal :)

sp332• 17 years ago

It is a breach of contract (if the EULA is enforceable), but it's not a criminal act. And I doubt they'll go after anyone for it.

yan• 17 years ago

It wasn't mentioned, but Pragmata is gorgeous. A bit pricey though.

holygoat3• 17 years ago

It was mentioned (at least when I read the post).

I find Pragmata so narrow it hurts to read. :(

sant0sk1• 17 years ago

I'm a huge Inconsolata fan. I prefer it big (16pt) and use it pretty much everywhere.

NikkiA2• 17 years ago

Agreed, it's 11pt Incosolata for me on my linux emacs, and 13pt Consolas on my windows emacs.

Beautiful fonts.

christopherdone• 17 years ago

Deja Vu Sans Mono is highly superior to all the mentioned fonts there. It works perfectly clearly with anti-aliasing. I honestly wonder if the people praising other fonts are just trying to be different. I'm probably being subjective. It would be cool to see some research into the top programming fonts to find which are least tiring to the eyes, most legible when tired or scanning, etc.

davidmathers• 17 years ago

Deja Vu Sans Mono is highly superior to all the mentioned fonts there.

?? It's number 3 on the list.

SlyShy• 17 years ago

Some fonts I like that they left off:

Envy Code R Pragmata Terminus

Avshalom• 17 years ago

Another Envy Code R fan here.

chrisallen• 17 years ago

I use terminus for code everywhere.

MartinCron4• 17 years ago

With modern languages and IDEs, I don't see any benefit to using monospaced fonts at all. I have been using Calibri for the last few years because it is readable and pleasant to look at, and I never have any problems lining things up provided they actually need to line up.

MartinCron4• 17 years ago

Instead of a downvote, how about a real explanation of why exactly monospaced fonts are actually required.

This bit of programmer dogma is totally unfounded. There is nothing more to it than tradition.

buugs• 17 years ago

Maybe for the same reasons you offered: readability and easy to look at.

Some modern monospaced fonts are rather nice to look at, Consolas for example, and the ability to distinguish between 0O1l easily is an advantage for some fonts without having weird letter spacings.

jrockway5• 17 years ago

When you press the "next-line" key, it's nice to know where you're going to end up. With a non-monospaced-font, you have to guess or count. With a monospaced font, it is visually obvious.

crux• 17 years ago

Well, part of it comes down to the fact that the text is read differently, depending on whether it's block letters or code. If you're writing prose, you process most text on a word-by-word basis, if not sentence-by-sentence. For instance, periods have very little spacing around them because there actually doesn't need to be that much more distance between letters at sentence boundaries—periods are not crucial characters, and thus do not have to be marked off from other letters. They are themselves boundary markers.

The situation is different with code. Every character that you type, unless it's within a comment, is very important. It's even quite possible that accidentally putting two spaces after a period might have some semantic effect, and it's certainly possible that having two periods instead of one will have some semantic effect. The programmer absolutely must be able to easily read code on a character-by-character basis, and thus he wants a typeface that treats each letter absolutely equally. It's only slightly distracting if your W is wider than your L, disrupting the natural grid of your text. But in a language where punctuation is just as important as the words themselves, you might just as well be troubled if your periods or commas have a tendency to disappear into the flow of letters.

Not to mention that there is nearly no block text font that has as much of an interest in differentiating I/l/1 and 0/O as programming/monospace fonts do.

etal• 17 years ago

If you code in a style that uses data literals (lists/arrays and dictionaries/hash tables) to represent how an important part of the code is going to work -- e.g. a table that maps letters or keywords to argument lists used in some corresponding function -- then monospace fonts and block selection go well together. You can tweak one column at a time without upsetting the others if you set it up properly.

(Python's PEP8 is meant to take care of abuses, like lining up all the equal signs in a series of assignments or keyword arguments -- you wouldn't think of those as columns of data in a table, so there's no point in formatting the code that way.)

Also, monospace makes punctuation more prominent. Bjarne Stroustrup's C++ reference book uses a mixed font in its code examples, with monospace punctuation characters and proportional-font identifiers. It's weird but effective. I suppose if your code doesn't do exciting things with punctuation characters, and doesn't embed tables of data, then a proportional font would be just fine.

akrito4• 17 years ago

I really tried to use proportional fonts for coding, but the kicker for me was selecting text with the mouse (or trackpad). I find it easier to position the pointer when all the letters are the same width. "i"s and "l"s are especially tricky to select accurately with a proportional font.

holygoat3• 17 years ago

Regardless of IDE support, code is structure and patterns.

Monospaced fonts make it easier for me to spot that structure and observe those patterns, whether to simplify my scanning of the code, help me spot bugs (e.g., omitted punctuation throws off the shape of a form), or navigate within a file.

I do essentially all of my writing — email, web forms, text editing, console — with monospaced fonts.

mkyc2• 17 years ago

Patterns are easier to identify with a non-monotonous font, as research into word-shapes shows. Some of the fonts I use have wider-than-usual spaces, or—and perhaps you've noticed this—punctuation like the em dash that have the correct width. Patterns, right?

What you're saying only applies if your "patterns" consist of forcing everything into the same length. I suspect that you might not know what you're talking about, but only because of your choice of language ("shape of a form", "code is structure and patterns" - what exactly is that supposed to mean, if anything?). It would really help me if your points were more concrete, and you gave some real examples.

mkyc2• 17 years ago

I've been using non-monospaced fonts for a long time now. I also have had no issues with things I or others have lined up. "Lining things up" usually amounts to screwing around - like variable names having identical lengths, at the expense of clarity. I actually can't think of any issues that I've had. At all. I have noticed that it's a easier to read, scan, and recognize the code. There is, after all, a reason monospaced fonts are hardly ever used elsewhere - not in technical reference manuals, dictionaries, fiction...

I usually keep my mouth shut about it because a lot of programmers identify with monospaced fonts (especially ugly ones). I suggest others do the same: quietly try it, because after the "this is different, therefore I hate it" feeling passes, you might find you prefer it.

sker• 17 years ago

I was a Consolas guy until I discovered Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. I find it more readable, you might want to check it out.

jrockway5• 17 years ago

Deja Vu * is Bitstream Vera * with Unicode characters. Good if you're not using Emacs and want nice-looking λs in your code. (Emacs has a map from character range -> font, so you can use your own Unicode font along with your favorite ASCII font. But using Deja Vu means you don't have to configure that as much.)

FWIW, I use Deja Vu Sans Mono for coding. It is a nice-looking font, especially when grey on black.

jbr• 17 years ago

My favorite: http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymous.html (free)

Installing anonymous is one of the first things I do when I get a new mac.

ApolloRising• 17 years ago

My favorite as well for textmate and coda

KevBurnsJr• 17 years ago

I also use Anonymous (on a PC to program in PHP) Even though the tilde is janky. ~shrug

there• 17 years ago

am i the only one still using xterm with its default "fixed" font in black-on-white?

Jeema3000• 17 years ago

Wingdings all the way

artificer• 17 years ago

Nice article, but somewhat incomplete. He misses many fonts (like Lucida Console, Envy Code R, Anonymous, Redhat's excellent Liberation Mono,Pragmata and a whole lot of others), he doesn't explain the font differences other than noting which he likes more, like serif/sanserif, hinting quality, character set coverage (Greek? Cyrillic?) etc.

derobert• 17 years ago

Neep http://www.jmknoble.net/fonts/ Unfortunately, its a bitmapped (non-scalable) font...

Hivelogic - Top Programming Fonts

Related Stories