PDA

View Full Version : Favorite font for programming?



Wybiral
December 28th, 2006, 05:47 AM
What is everyones favorite font for programming? It may seem like a trivial question, but it's always best to have a readable, small font for most programming languages.

Personally, I use "courier new" either size 8 or 9.

Does anyone know of a more readable small font?

po0f
December 28th, 2006, 05:50 AM
I use Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, 10pt (?). This font looks good at a fairly small size, and bold/italic variants don't look funky.

Wybiral
December 28th, 2006, 05:59 AM
Wow, you're right, the "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono Bold" is easy to read, I especially like it at 8pt. The italic has funny "{" but normals "}"... Wonder why that is...

coder_
December 28th, 2006, 11:13 AM
:) Yay! I love discussing coding fonts! :P

I'm using "Fixed" right now in GNU Emacs. I also like "Deja Vu Sans Mono" size 10.
The one TextMate on Mac OS X (Monoco maybe?) looks nice though...

amo-ej1
December 28th, 2006, 05:43 PM
anything monospace, and anything that results in antialiased fonts in emacs (especially since edgy behaves bad with legacy X applications ).

Note360
December 28th, 2006, 06:02 PM
Oh, my favorite topic. I must say that Deja Vu Sans Mono is nice, but I still think I am goign to go back to "Proggy Clean" or "Proggy Square". I must say that I like Consolas alot, but it looks bad with out Cleartype or OSX's supreme font handling abilities.

Wybiral
December 28th, 2006, 06:38 PM
Its nice to see that I'm not the only person picky about my font. I guess with programming, after you get so used to seeing the same font, changing it makes things look really weird, almost like it isn't the same program.

With programming it's especially important because the difference between i, l, |, !, and 1 is a huge difference in most programs, so a readable font is required. But we also have to see as much text as we can in order to work as quickly as possible, so size and readability are huge factors.

neo_reloaded
December 28th, 2006, 08:03 PM
If you have sub-pixel smoothing capabilities running:

Monaco
Lucida Sans Typewriter and
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono will look really good

If not,

Courier New, Courier 10 pitch or Proggy Fonts will be good

dwblas
December 29th, 2006, 05:06 AM
Another vote for Bitstream Vera. I think I'll try Deja Vu though to see what it looks like. It's good to change the font every now and then.

Note360
December 29th, 2006, 08:14 PM
Deja Vu is just Bitstream Vera, but with mroe characters. I use it cause it seems slightly nicer to my eye (I do not know why). I tried to install the Proggy fonts but they aare freaking out on me now (besides they only look good w/o anti-aliasing) I guess I am back to Deja Vu.

Nathaniel
May 15th, 2007, 12:38 PM
I use Consolas, I got the font from Office 2007 and installed it in Linux as well. I think it looks awesome, but some letters to have a tendency to look very similar (like l and 1, or cursive l and L). I use it because it's very readable in small sizes, which is great when you have to work all day in 1024x768 >_<

Ramses de Norre
May 15th, 2007, 02:31 PM
DejaVu sans mono Book 9.

bl4k3r
May 15th, 2007, 02:38 PM
I'm in love with Consolas 10pt (http://www.blaker.de/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/consolas.jpg). :)

EndPerform
May 15th, 2007, 02:45 PM
I'm a fan of Terminus, myself. Use it in my console and editor of choice (Vim)

Incάnus
May 15th, 2007, 02:57 PM
I use DEC Terminal Bold or Lucida Sans Unicode, depending on the situation.

Fixed width is good, but serif fonts are bad for readability for most people.

I always end up coming back to my Lucida - there's a reason for its name, and while other fonts look nicer I always end up coming back to it.

jespdj
May 15th, 2007, 06:52 PM
I use Consolas, I got the font from Office 2007 and installed it in Linux as well. I think it looks awesome, but some letters to have a tendency to look very similar (like l and 1, or cursive l and L). I use it because it's very readable in small sizes, which is great when you have to work all day in 1024x768 >_<

I am using Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, 10pt on Linux and 9pt on Windows (in Eclipse). Courier New looks ugly and unreadable when you have subpixel smoothing on in Linux.

I also tried Microsoft's Consolas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolas) and while it looks good on Windows with ClearType on, I don't like how it looks on Linux. On Linux, it looks like the third example on the Wikipedia page - it looks bold even though it isn't.

foresth
May 15th, 2007, 09:32 PM
Lucida Console :]]

rickardg
May 16th, 2007, 09:13 AM
After having spent far to much time (a year ago or so) first getting xft-emacs working and then testing different fonts I discovered that I actually prefer a well made bitmap font to an anti-aliased for programming.

Now I use terminus-14 even if it is a bit large, it looks really great at 12 but then you won't get the bold face, which of course isn't much of a problem for programming (depending on how angry your fruit salad is), but I use emacs for a lot more.

http://ubuntuforums.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=32157&d=1178733040

Fixed isn't bad either except that O (capital o) and 0 (zero) look too similar.

qebab
May 16th, 2007, 08:57 PM
I tend to prefer monospaced fonts; lately my favorite has been Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. It looks really great in emacs-snapshot, readable and all that.

Zootropo
May 16th, 2007, 10:25 PM
Consolas and Profont are my personal choices.
I wrote an article comparing different fonts a while ago. It's in spanish but each font has an screenshot of its look, so I think it can be useful to you anyway:

http://mundogeek.net/archivos/2006/11/18/fuentes-para-programacion/

Kelsin
June 29th, 2007, 03:24 AM
Since I recently started a job that gave me a mac laptop I fell in love with Monoco. That font isn't available for other platforms is it? I should check into that. On linux I just use Bitstream Mono like most people :) Suits the purpose.

Paul820
June 29th, 2007, 03:35 AM
Never saw this thread before. I use Monospace 8. I actually hated it the first time i used it because i was used to the pixelated microsoft fonts but now i can't do without it. A lot of fonts on linux are not consistent in the spacing.

samjh
June 29th, 2007, 01:59 PM
Sans Mono 10

or

Courier New 10

Lux Perpetua
June 29th, 2007, 11:04 PM
I don't use Bitstream Mono, Deja Vu Mono, etc. because (1) I don't like the shape of the lowercase l (ell) and (2) I can't stand the zero with the dot inside. I understand the importance of distinguishable 1/l and 0/O, but come on...

I currently use Luxi Mono. It's a bit sensitive to the rendering engine, though...for example, autohinter vs. native makes a big difference in readability. Also, there are some sizes in which it looks good and other sizes in which it's just a mess.

I've tried to install some of the Proggy fonts, but I couldn't get them to work.

patrick295767
November 6th, 2007, 01:54 AM
I like these fonts :

http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/8238/fontstypecomputermovieakj6.jpg

someone knows what is could be similar to ?

Anzan
December 5th, 2007, 02:56 AM
I've gone from Bitstream Vera to DejaVu recently and am very happy with it.

duncan_bayne
April 3rd, 2008, 07:49 AM
My favourite is ProFont - I've blogged about installing it on Xubuntu (& configuring Emacs to use it) here (http://www.fluidscape.co.nz/?q=node/92).

CptPicard
April 3rd, 2008, 10:13 AM
Too bad there is no font like MS Script on my machine... but this is a fair approximation of the poetic aesthetical effect I was looking for:
http://www.voittoporukka.fi/~eero/prettyfont.png (http://www.voittoporukka.fi/%7Eeero/prettyfont.png)

I can only suspect that those semi-mythical girl geeks code in something like this... (yes I will get the Borg Queen's wrath for this.. ;) )

pedro_orange
April 3rd, 2008, 10:20 AM
Courier.

Choice of the professional :)

jespdj
April 3rd, 2008, 02:10 PM
Too bad there is no font like MS Script on my machine... but this is a fair approximation of the poetic aesthetical effect I was looking for:
http://www.voittoporukka.fi/~eero/prettyfont.png (http://www.voittoporukka.fi/%7Eeero/prettyfont.png)

I can only suspect that those semi-mythical girl geeks code in something like this... (yes I will get the Borg Queen's wrath for this.. ;) )
Are you serious? Do you want to use THAT font for programming?! April 1 is already two days ago! ;)

I recently discovered the Red Hat Liberation fonts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts), which look really nice. I'm now using Liberation Mono 10 pt for programming. There's an Ubuntu package for these fonts:

sudo apt-get install ttf-liberation

sekinto
April 3rd, 2008, 02:22 PM
I don't really care much about font. But my favorite for programming would probably be Squareshooter Mono.

pmasiar
April 3rd, 2008, 04:08 PM
Dina (http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Jibz/Dina/index.html) is font specially designed for programmers, and is free. Surprisigly readable even at 8pt.

Nemooo
April 3rd, 2008, 07:10 PM
I'm using Monospace at 8pt.

There's seemingly no difference between that and Deja Vu Sans Mono and Bitstream Sans Mono?

Lster
April 3rd, 2008, 07:36 PM
Monospace at 10. I'm boring! :p

bovus
April 3rd, 2008, 08:08 PM
fixedsys

Awalton
April 5th, 2008, 01:32 AM
One of the only theme-wise changes I make to my system is the fonts; I used Liberation Sans/Liberation Mono for a while, but now I'm pretty stuck on the Droid family of fonts from Google to the point that I carry them around on my thumb drive and use them everywhere.

(I also can't stand any Serif fonts, but that's a whole other story).

vectraproject
April 18th, 2008, 07:05 PM
Hi,


I love programming on emacs with dec-terminal-bold, but this font does not seem present on my new system.

how can I import it / download it??

I'm a complete newbie for fonts :(

vectraproject
April 18th, 2008, 11:28 PM
I brought the police back to emacs thanks to a dirty trick: I backed up /usr/share/fonts and replaced it by the version from my previous distro.

It "works", but I suppose it wrecks a lot of things in my system :/

vectraproject
April 19th, 2008, 01:46 AM
oh my.

I just made a new fonts directory into which I copied the content of the newest distro and the oldest. Mutually overlapping.

I tried it without any of the problems I encountered beforehand.
So, solved in a stupid, blind, and barbarian way?

supirman
April 19th, 2008, 02:03 AM
proggy or profont for me, usually the smaller the better for me.

Sockerdrickan
April 21st, 2008, 09:23 PM
monospace all the way

ruy_lopez
April 21st, 2008, 09:44 PM
xterm -fn 7x13

Nothing fancy, just the standard xterm font, fairly small.

Mickeysofine1972
April 21st, 2008, 10:03 PM
Personally, I have mild dyslexia and find any sans-serif type font really makes life easier.

serif fonts like times roman etc really make the page wobble big style!

Mike

adben
May 4th, 2008, 06:37 PM
Liberation Mono or Inconsolata
for console too

LaRoza
May 4th, 2008, 07:34 PM
Personally, I have mild dyslexia and find any sans-serif type font really makes life easier.

serif fonts like times roman etc really make the page wobble big style!

Mike

No one uses serif fonts for programming I think.

ricky_cullen
May 4th, 2008, 07:45 PM
I am not a true programmer yet, however, when i was customizeing Idle i used a ont i downloaded from the megadeth site which is called Megadeth Cryptic Font
it can be downloaded at Megadeth Cryptic Font
http://www.megadeth.com/downloads/pcdeth.zip,
now down the road as i get better at programming this might change but fot the time being it seems fine

LaRoza
May 4th, 2008, 07:48 PM
I am not a true programmer yet, however, when i was customizeing Idle i used a ont i downloaded from the megadeth site which is called Megadeth Cryptic Font
it can be downloaded at Megadeth Cryptic Font
http://www.megadeth.com/downloads/pcdeth.zip,
now down the road as i get better at programming this might change but fot the time being it seems fine

Interesting.

Thread Moved to Cafe as this isn't a programming question.

blithen
May 4th, 2008, 08:06 PM
I always liked the font for the linux distro 'Grml-small'
But alas I can't seem to get it working. Uni3-terminus16 is the font name.

frenchn00b
May 25th, 2008, 06:48 PM
I am fan of those:


mrxvt -bg black -fg green -bt -sr -font -xos4-*-bold-r-normal--17-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*

hugmenot
June 2nd, 2008, 12:20 AM
No one uses serif fonts for programming I think.

Courier is a (slab) serif and widely used for coding.

-grubby
June 2nd, 2008, 12:27 AM
Now that I've started doing stuff in Python, I guess I can say I'm programming (though I've been writing stuff in PHP for a while now, which isn't really a programming language, but it's good enough). The font Kate says I'm using is Monospace at size 10

Joeb454
June 2nd, 2008, 12:31 AM
Monospaced fonts are good because it makes it easier to line your code up :)