Your coding font

Your coding font is a personal, and sometimes difficult choice. With so much variety, how can you decide?

I was directed to two resources today that helps make it a bit easier. The first is:

They show you a variety of fonts, lets you pin the ones that interest you, and compare in various sizes and themes.

An even more useful one is:

This presents the fonts in a tournament style where you keep picking between two until you get down to one (or two) that you like. It takes about 10 minutes, and I recommend hiding the font names to eliminate bias towards your favorite font.

Pay attention to how certain characters are presented, like “a”, “g”, “r”, and zero, and how certain symbols are drawn, notably “$” and “~” (the latter is hard to pick out in some fonts!)

Finally, some fonts will combine certain symbols into a single character, like “<=” to “≤”. Don’t pay much attention to that as there is usually a variation that doesn’t do that, e.g., JetBrains Mono (with ligatures) and JetBrains Mono NL (without).

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I’m on mac, and switched to using Consolas for the Xojo IDE - I find it a pretty good one for my needs. It’s fixed width and has lots of handy features (such as distinguishing between O and 0 (Oh and Zero) etc…

@Kem_Tekinay what’s your favorite?

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JetBrains Mono, and that ended up as one of my last two when I did the Coding Font “tournament”, so I must really like it. :slight_smile:

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I just did the tournament and ended up with PT mono #1 and JetBrains Mono #2. They look pretty similar to Consolas to me, and since Consolas is built in to macOS and I’m lazy, I’ll probably stick with Consolas for now. Cool information, thank you!

I have been using Source Code Pro for many years, but the quiz led me to Red Hat Mono Light which I am trying out, and so far looks great on a Retina screen.

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i using Source Code Pro Semibold.
in past FixedSys (which looks not original at programmingfonts, somehow it looks bold there)

I should say that I tried the Jetbrains font a few years ago, but the ligature conversions weirded me out too much.

That’s what’s nice about that site. By hiding the font names, you eliminate biases and rely solely on what appeals to you. I had to look hard to spot differences in some of the comparisons though.

Heh. I’ve been using Source Code Pro for a very long time. The tournament - with names hidden - lead me too… Source Code Pro. I guess I know what I like.

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… and Red Hat Mono borks backwards quotes, so it’s back to good ol’ Source Code Pro.

I really thought more people would be choosing ComicShanns:

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I stay strictly with serif fonts for maximum readability/minimum ambiguity, and monospace of course. That doesn’t leave many options. I’ve stuck with Courier for many years, I haven’t seen any new fonts that would convince me to change.

I use Fira Code.
https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

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12pt Monaco, me.

I’ve used Hack for many years, but ran through the tool that Kem shared. It suggested I would like a font called Inconsolata. Going to give that a whirl for a bit and see what I think after a few days of use.

Also, if on macOS, go to Terminal.app / Preferences / Profiles and see what your curent font is. Mine is Monaco 10, which I think is a pretty good one too.

I’m using Menlo. I didn’t much like the tournament because:

  • Too many fonts. I was bored after half a dozen turns.
  • Bad presentation. I didn’t see much difference between the fonts.
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Yeah I noticed that about RedHat Mono. I liked the font but `" ends up as some wacky glyph. Shame.

Edit: Looks like the Red Hat team are looking into a fix. The backtick glyph is currently broken:

Nothing can beat Pragmata Pro. :wink:

Turns out, I hate Inconsolata. Trying out one of the Ubuntu monospaced fonts instead.