See this page Dev Fonts.
Which one of these fonts, or alternately, what other font not appearing on that page is "the true one and only" programming font?
Let the (friendly!) battles begin!
(Please include, if possible, a link from which it can be downloaded.--Ed.)
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Fonts for Programmers and Developers
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Friday November 20 2020, @11:50PM (4 children)
LOL my first thought was this was a nice collection for microcontrollers and homemade GUIs to use.
Tricky sometimes if you have a high res LCD and a tiny 4x6 font will fit but be too tiny to see whereas right at the end of dot matric printing there were 24 pin printers although that starts using a lot of memory.
You can have weird conversations like "we don't have enough flash for that high res display". A ultra super tiny micro and e-ink (like, an e-ink thermometer?) would be awful to program text rendering on.
(Score: 5, Informative) by darkfeline on Saturday November 21 2020, @04:19AM (3 children)
You want a specially designed bitmap font for that, like https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html [lag.net]
You don't want any fancy TrueType font that needs rendering and looks all pretty, which are the fonts under discussion.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday November 21 2020, @04:41PM (2 children)
Well more like might have to compromise. The demands of microcontroller programming, people want display hardware that costs less than their cell phone charger but has the same DPI as their cell phone and looks as good as their cell phone, good luck with that.
Back to the topic of the linked article someday microcontrollers will use desktop quality fonts, just not (usually) today. Yeah yeah high end STM32 microcontrollers being more powerful than a phone from a few years back, etc etc.
I just find the idea intriguing that someday I could run the same font on my desktop IDE as on an embedded display, not today most of the time, but someday yeah.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday November 22 2020, @12:12PM (1 child)
My guess is that there will always be a niche for simple fonts. Because fancy font work takes a surprising amount of computation. I have a 133MHz Pentium based laptop that still has the Windows 98 it came with, and one thing that makes for a noticeable boost in performance is turning off the font hinting and font anti-aliasing. The GUI simply renders faster. Menus pop up faster. With a little jump in the hardware performance, to a 1Gz Pentium 3, the performance hit from hinting and anti-alaising becomes imperceptible.
Most fonts, even many monospace fonts. look awful without hinting and anti-aliasing. One of the few that doesn't need that to look good is a monospace one, Terminus. I've been wishing for a long time someone would make a proportional font that looks good without hinting and anti-aliasing.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday November 26 2020, @04:32PM
Sry for the late response.
To embrace and extend your remarks, computation is battery power, too. You can get a wearable twice a week charge fitbit with pixels big enough to see, but hyper high dpi cellphone like screen would need daily charging if not more often. Just more pixels to read and write...
(Score: 5, Funny) by Gaaark on Friday November 20 2020, @11:51PM (4 children)
https://www.wfonts.com/font/comic-sans-ms [wfonts.com]
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Touché) by hendrikboom on Saturday November 21 2020, @12:20AM (3 children)
Not fixed width. Hard to control layout with spaces.
-- hendrik
(Score: 5, Informative) by mmh on Saturday November 21 2020, @01:57AM (1 child)
Don’t worry! The internet will never let you down:
https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/ [github.io]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday November 21 2020, @10:30PM
Looks usable.
A few things: the description on https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/ [github.io] doesn't make it cleat how digit 0 and upper-case O are distinguished.
The difference between 1 and lower-case l is quite clear.
The exclamation mark needs slightly more space between the dot and its vertical bar; as it it looks very much like a vertical bar itself. Though I admit I didn't see any actual vertical bars in the sample to compare it with.
How much character set does it provide? Just traditional seven-bit ASCII?
Having the entire character set present in the description would be pleasant.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @06:28AM
my source code is a continuous string of characters. if you can make the thinner ones take up less space, it means I can see more code!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @12:09AM (5 children)
I had cataract surgery about 10 years ago for both eyes. I swapped farsightedness to nearsightedness.
All fonts suck.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @02:32AM (3 children)
Amen!!!
What is really bad is the one that replace a 2 char >= with a single character and then the line just looks like the normal buried vision. So those are all crap.
The monos are better, but dump the stupid colors!!! Contract is important.
Give me back my IBM 5250 GREEN screen! That was a good work house!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Saturday November 21 2020, @03:15AM (2 children)
Those are called ligatures. They are available for almost all things that can be replaced by another symbol. They are horrific in every possibly way and should all just die in a fire.
I kind of like (colour) syntax highlighting, it makes it quite easy to see when I forgot to add a ; or " or (insert symbol of your choice here that is needed to close or end or whatever some statement) or spelled something wrong.
(Score: 1) by schusselig on Saturday November 21 2020, @08:51PM
But the ligatures are what make open type font something you can program *in*. https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html [blogspot.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 22 2020, @02:23PM
Ligatures can be disabled, though.
(Score: 2) by rufty on Saturday November 21 2020, @11:04AM
https://www.fontspace.com/category/braille [fontspace.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Saturday November 21 2020, @12:23AM (15 children)
I must be getting older but have we not talked about this before?
Anyway it should be monospaced, clean and clear. All ligatures should be disabled and just go and burn in hell. Serifs can be nice, but they seem to in large have fallen out of style. That said Fira code is quite nice.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by qzm on Saturday November 21 2020, @12:28AM (8 children)
If you are hung up on the font of your editor, then you are not concentrating on what matters.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @12:54AM (4 children)
The programming language the editor is written in!
*ducks*
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday November 21 2020, @03:10AM (3 children)
No, the characters used for indentation. And how many of them.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @05:29AM
If you are never triggered by the style of open/close block braces, you may be using a P programming language.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @11:34AM (1 child)
Yet the two are related, as since one of the chief arguments for hard spaces as indentation is that "the code looks the same on everyone's screen", then it logically follows that space-advocates should also be advocating using a specific font.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday November 22 2020, @01:02PM
Ahh, you are all suffering the assumption that a monospace grid is necessary to properly display source code. Leading spaces is a terrible, terrible way to specify indentation, but we've been stuck with it since the dawn of computing. No, I am not ranting about Python. The fault lies in ASCII, not Python.
ASCII has all this control character space that was meant for exactly this sort of problem, but they blew it and didn't think beyond the grid. The tab character is a fine mess. It was overloaded to be both a means of indentation and column alignment, and ends up being good at neither. Another mess is the CR/LF. That function is the only control character function that is still important.
The ANSI escape sequences merely repeat the mistake of depending upon a monospace grid. HTML is a pretty good example of how it could have and perhaps should have been done. CR/LF is most often used as <br>, which is of negative value in written text. One of the most annoying things to see is LF used for text line formatting for text lines that work out to be slightly too wide, so that every long line is continued with a few characters on the next line. To avoid that, the LF or CR is sometimes used as <p>, which doesn't look so good on dumb terminals that can't break lines at spaces, instead chopping words in half.
I really think it could be worthwhile to do a reboot of the ASCII control characters, a repurposing, to do some of the things HTML can do, but make it possible to do with minimal computing and lookahead. (Don't want to have to scan far ahead to compute how wide to make the columns of a table, or any other of the sorts of problems word processors face.) The committee purposely left the exact meaning of a lot of control characters vague, because they were very uncertain, and rushed, in deciding how the system should work.
(Score: 5, Touché) by looorg on Saturday November 21 2020, @12:57AM (2 children)
Who said I was hung up about it? It was asked. I answered. If I can pick something nice it won't hurt and if it makes it easier to read the code then what is the downside? You are free to code with whatever font you like, even comic-sans-serif if you like. That said, normally whatever fixed width system font comes with the machines tends to do the trick.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @02:01AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday November 23 2020, @12:57AM
The I and l look similar. You have to look close to distinguish them.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by legont on Saturday November 21 2020, @02:18AM
Yep. Monospace, which always comes with distro's terminal, it is the only one.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by krishnoid on Saturday November 21 2020, @06:31AM (4 children)
Between you and the cataract surgery patient above, isn't "getting older" a real age-discrimination issue in this area? Tiny, poorly-chosen/designed fonts and high-resolution laptop screens could easily be used surreptitiously to narrow down people's age [youtu.be] during interviews.
A broader concern is that choices growing out of recent design theory/fad/classes/graduates are designed for people with younger vision (and attention spans?) and perhaps other facilities, which could push older users/developers out while making them think it's their fault as their facilities very slowly degrade over time. For reference, see the eye-chart sized day numbers surrounded by the extra-informative extra whitespace in the recent Google Calendar [google.com] changes on modern desktop browsers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday November 21 2020, @11:24AM (3 children)
Only bigcorp HR morons mark age as a bad thing. Everyone else knows why $recentgrad isn't nearly as valuable as $oldfart when $oldfart has literally been coding longer than $recentgrad has been alive. Work for someone else or even yourself and let the life noobs put up with being treated like they're working at McDonalds.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday November 21 2020, @09:39PM
Everyone else including some of the @recentgrads doing the interviewing and "don't trust anyone over 40"?
(Score: 3, Funny) by krishnoid on Saturday November 21 2020, @09:43PM (1 child)
At least older guys don't have Sean Connery [bbc.com] to contend with as a standard for "sexy old guy" anymore. RIP, a standard to aspire for.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday November 21 2020, @11:28PM
Sam Elliott has been the one setting the bar. Connery was a badass but Sam's mustache could have whooped him all by itself.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by isj on Saturday November 21 2020, @01:44AM
...because my browser doesn't download webfonts. So eg. the first example has the calculated style:
font-family: sans-serif, Cascadia, Comic Sans MS;
and my system chooses to show all the examples using the font "Roboto". BTW, the inline stylesheet has the font-fallback "Comic Sans MS". WTF...
(Score: 5, Informative) by NickM on Saturday November 21 2020, @01:54AM (1 child)
That font [github.com] was designed for the venerable IBM 3270 terminal. Nothing approach that font in a terminal.
For code I use the IDE or editor default it's almost always close enough for gouvernment works!
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday November 21 2020, @02:24AM
Yes, this is good. Thank you for the tip.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bart9h on Saturday November 21 2020, @01:55AM (9 children)
To easily distinguish from 1 and l, O and 0, { and (, ` and ', and so on.
I like Inconsolata [levien.com] (and it's usually available as a package for most distros), but I'm sure there are a few other nice options out there.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by darkfeline on Saturday November 21 2020, @04:21AM (5 children)
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by krishnoid on Saturday November 21 2020, @04:40AM
I'd put the less-than and greater-than next to the parentheses. Some fonts at small sizes (and old eyeglass prescriptions) make them look similar.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @06:32AM (2 children)
argh! you put curly braces inside square brackets! what is wrong with you?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday November 21 2020, @04:40PM (1 child)
You've got to test the font for containment of evil...
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday November 22 2020, @01:11PM
Evil? How about a mechanical typewriter from the 1950s which doesn't even have a '1' key! You were supposed to use 'l' (lower case L), when you wanted a 1.
There are l0 kinds of people, those who understand binary, and cynics who saw that as the opposite of "hi".
(Score: 2) by ze on Saturday November 21 2020, @11:07PM
I like a pretty small Deja Vu Sans Mono quite fine: https://i.imgur.com/OPS7yNG.png [imgur.com]
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @06:47AM
> To easily distinguish from 1 and l, O and 0, { and (, ` and ', and so on.
Duh, that's what the compiler's for.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday November 21 2020, @07:04AM
That's why I use Input [fontbureau.com] as my preferred monospace font. I find it easy to read in general, but you can actually customise it on the "preview" page with different forms for some characters like i, l, 0, {}, etc. along with custom width, weight, and line height so that you can choose what's more readable to you before downloading.
It's also free for "personal" use, meaning you can use it as your IDE font anywhere including at a job; though if you want to provide it for use within an application you create, like if you wanted to develop and distribute a text editor, you'd have to buy a license to do that.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Sunday November 22 2020, @05:02PM
I like Hack [sourcefoundry.org] and have been using it for years. It's specially designed to be readable even when the size is small and you want to know if that's a number or a letter or a special character. IMO, it's very well done and I use it for everything I want monospaced. It's also open source and free.
(Score: 3, Informative) by jon3k on Saturday November 21 2020, @03:10AM
I've been using Terminus [ax86.net] (original [sourceforge.net]) for years. I don't see any reason to change.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @04:25AM
For me, Monaco from macos serves me very well.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by nostyle on Saturday November 21 2020, @08:07AM (7 children)
Fonts are a distraction.
If the code compiles and runs bug-free, life is good.
If the commentary I craft expresses truth, and the grammar and spelling checks, life is good.
Growing up it was all courier for mono-spacing and times-roman for looking bookish. Arial got me through the dark years of the MS work-spaces. These days, whatever defaults into the xterm usually works for me, though I do opt for liberation mono regular [fontsquirrel.com] in my xfce4-terminals.
Life is way too short to fret or fight over fonts.
--
"Knowledge is one point, which the foolish have multiplied", Persian proverb.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday November 21 2020, @11:33AM
Yup. Unless I need lots of wacky unicode characters to show up as other than boxes, I use whatever the default is. When I do need unicode wackiness I go with Noto Mono, on account of it being almost as complete and looking a whole lot less like a baboon's ass than unifont.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Saturday November 21 2020, @04:05PM (1 child)
Same here. I use multiple instances of vim in xterms. Newer versions of Slackware-current come with what I consider to be a broken configuration for XTerm, ie the font is too large. I replace the new /etc/X11/app-defaults/XTerm with the previous version. My screen is 1920 pixels wide (by 1200 tall) and I like to have three columns of source on the screen at a time.
One thing I have found, though, is that looking at code in a different font has a weird effect for me. I think I might be slightly dyslexic (I've got some of the symptoms I think) and sometimes there will be a bug in some code and I just can't see it. Sometimes, opening the source in another editor (eg a GUI one) with a different font and colour scheme makes the bug leap out. It must be something to do with the way my brain fills in missing information. The effect is similar to going away for a day, having a good sleep and then looking at the code again.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Monday November 23 2020, @01:06AM
I use that as a proof-reading technique for text.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Saturday November 21 2020, @05:12PM (1 child)
Done right it has nothing to do with style. I'd consider a font as big an ergonomic consideration as your chair, desk, keyboard, and monitor. Yeah, you can write a perfectly good program hunched over on a hard stool with a half-sized keyboard and 10" screen balanced on an old crumpled box, but it's going to be uncomfortable and slow you down, and just generally make your life less pleasant for absolutely no benefit. Life is a gift to be celebrated, not endured. It'll be over soon enough, and there no guarantee that there's anything afterward.
If you spend hours a day reading code, the font should make that as easy as possible. It's not something I obsess over, but it's worth paying a little attention to something that can make your job considerably easier or harder.
My biggest concern is clarity - O0o should all look obviously different. Same for 1|lIi ,.' ''" [{( etc. Nothing pisses me off faster than a font that makes typos harder to spot.
Then there's reading comfort, as well as being more pleasant and less distracting, I find a "comfortable" font can increase my reading spread a good 10-20% over an "uncomfortable" font. Monospaced fonts are pretty terrible for comfort, but almost essential for programming, and I find some fonts really provide a dramatic improvement. I'd no more use an uncomfortable font for regular use than I would sit in an uncomfortable chair.
Finally there's legibility at small sizes - I sometimes like to zoom way out so that I can see several screens of code at once for an overview of longer functions - and the font needs to remain legible for that to work.
Finally, I'm opposed to programming ligatures. They're a fun idea in theory, but I don't see that they actually contribute anything worthwhile, and every now and then the font engine will interpret a character sequence differently than the compiler and misrepresent the code. If you're going to have non-standard characters they should be displayed by an IDE that actually understands the code rather than just treating it as a character stream. Which is something I actually think has immense potential, but have never actually seen except for introductory "toy" IDEs
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday November 23 2020, @01:10AM
Yes, it matters how the font is perceived by the brain, and individuals vary in this respect.
For example, there are special fonts designed for the dyslexic. They make the alphabet look less symmetrical.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @10:56PM (1 child)
Liberation is notably uglier than DejaVu, in my opinion.
Moreover, the good guys at RedHat, while monkeying with the files they got from Ascender Corp., lost some "unnecessary parts" such as VDMX tables, so the metrics did not anymore match the MS fonts that Liberation family was designed to be a metric-compatible replacement of. The last un-mangled version was 1.03 (the latest that Ascender Corp gave them). Then in 2018 they at last decided to throw their handiwork out to the trash heap where it belonged, and started anew with forking Croscore family (from Ascender Corp again, the same design) into "Liberation 2.0". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts#Distribution [wikipedia.org]
Given the above track record, I think even if one prefers Liberation's look, it makes much more sense to use the real deal, i.e. the Cousine font.
(Score: 2) by nostyle on Sunday November 22 2020, @12:07AM
> it makes much more sense to use the real deal, i.e. the Cousine font
...the trouble being that whilst "liberation" fonts are a pre-installed option in the distro I use, "cousine" is not, and, once again, life is too short to fret over the difference. I am a lazy one.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Saturday November 21 2020, @12:12PM
Since it was a bitmap font only. Though, back then, Lightspeed/THINK Pascal with its marked-up proportional Geneva wasn't half bad.
But I don't really mind. IIRC, I haven't ever swapped out a font under Linux, or even, when they made me once use VS, under Windows. Bitstream Vera or Liberation Mono will do. I'd lean a little towards Vera. I have not noticed what font the Windoze box used, probably because the remainder was so revolting, and I'm usually a font nerd raising loud protest when Helvetica appears in a WWII setting!
Among the fonts on the page, Inconsolata looks well balanced, but on really close scrutiny, the c is a tad too round, and the lowercase a and g use the complex forms which will not cater well to really small sizes. It also has no marked zero. Cousine seems similar, but with the simple g and a proper 0. Roboto is fine, and Hack would be a lovely Monaco ripoff if it weren't for the stupid zero mark. Oxygen is very tidy and Monacolike. Space is a bit unconventional, but might work well. Ubuntu is reasonably clean. If I had to choose, it'd be Oxygen, but I wouldn't really revolt with any of them as long as l and 1 and O and 0 can easily be told apart.
To me it's more important than fonts that the mouse response is classic Mac-like. I loathe the high initial and low terminal acceleration under Windows and feel disturbed when the click response does not have the right micro-cues.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pTamok on Saturday November 21 2020, @01:13PM
Choice of typeface and font is down to individual taste, so I would not be so bold as to declare any one in particular is the only one people should use.
However, there are quantitative measures that can be used to compare legibility of fonts and their reading speed, which might influence some people's choice: it is not purely aesthetic. Some choice could well be down to what you are used to: your brain is a self-modifying learning mechanism, and having invested in understanding a particular typeface, you might find it tiring to put in the work needed for a different one to be as easily recognisable/interpretable.
So, meh. If it for your own use, choose what you like, if it for use by other people, try and choose one that is best for the use-case, supported by independent quantitative testing, where possible. Be aware that your preconceptions and experience might be wrong. Where possible, give readers a choice. If not possible to give a choice, choose something that minimises problems for the disadvantaged. This procedure applies to many UI elements.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Skywise on Saturday November 21 2020, @02:52PM
Been using it for...uh... decades...
https://tobiasjung.name/profont/ [tobiasjung.name]
(Score: 1) by crm114 on Saturday November 21 2020, @11:46PM
Link: https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/profontwindows [fontsquirrel.com]
Why? 'cause about 2000-2003 I needed a font I could use to code. My eyes/brain got used to it. Local copy, copied through several generations of OS's/Distributions
My Mac, Win10, Linux, BSD boxes all have terminal windows that "look the same"
Not the best, but better than switching optics same time as switching OS's
Sincerely,
Old fart.
(Score: 3, Informative) by istartedi on Sunday November 22 2020, @12:45AM (2 children)
I'm using Consolas, but what's important is that it's 22 pt. and still shows 80 columns on my monitor.
Don't laugh. You'll be there some day if you keep programming or doing any other kind of close work. I'm just shy of needing bifocals too.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 22 2020, @12:47PM
I use it for doco .. it stands and and formats code nicely
(Score: 1) by hman on Monday November 23 2020, @01:46PM
Same here, but I hate what Consolas does to some wider characters (touching, bleeding if the monitor is not wonderfully sharp).
If you never did try out the InputMono and InputSans families. I suspect you could prefer something like InputSansCompressed to Consolas, I find it more readable than Consolas and a hair narrower (so more columns).