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Programming Fonts – Test Drive

app.programmingfonts.org

61–70 of 289 posts

Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive

#61
I've been using DejaVu Sans Mono for quite some time. It's a nice font. It used to be the default monospace font in KDE, until they switched to Noto Mono. Autohinting setting for fontconfig makes it look better for me:

    
    
      
        DejaVu Sans Mono
      
      
        true
      
    

Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive

#62

My favourite for a few years now is a commercial font, Triplicate. It’s a true serif monospace font; every other monospace font I’ve encountered that is labelled “serif” is actually a slab serif. It has a proper italic face as well, which is a less rare, but it’s a functional italic face rather than ornamental. It comes with some interesting variants, most notably Poly which is not fully monospaced, adjusting the wid…

$99 for a font... Seems like the artisinal font industry gets its business model from free-to-play, i.e. whale-hunting.

Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive

#63
post #18

I quite like IBM Plex Mono as a programming font... https://github.com/IBM/plex would be nice if the page has a way of making suggestions of fonts to add.

If you like that font, you could try out the mono version from iA Writer (a famous writing app) which they have released recently, it's based on plex but looks a bit better imo!

https://ia.net/writer/blog/a-typographic-christmas

Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive

#65
post #44

I'm surprised that the list doesn't mention consolas. It ships default with visual studio and it's so good that I use it on arch Linux as my terminal font and with intellij. It was designed with programming in mind and has some nifty characteristics like a slash through zero. This list also misses out on 'operator mono' which is a well thought out font for programming.

Consolas ships with Windows itself since Win7.

Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive

#66

My favourite for a few years now is a commercial font, Triplicate. It’s a true serif monospace font; every other monospace font I’ve encountered that is labelled “serif” is actually a slab serif. It has a proper italic face as well, which is a less rare, but it’s a functional italic face rather than ornamental. It comes with some interesting variants, most notably Poly which is not fully monospaced, adjusting the wid…

It looks quite similar to golang font: https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts It has serifs and true italics. Might be an interesting free alternative.

Ah yes, I had forgotten about that one—it’s definitely the closest font I’ve found to Triplicate, and its serif style is partially slab and partially true serif (to a similar degree to Triplicate, really).

Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive

#67

My favourite for a few years now is a commercial font, Triplicate. It’s a true serif monospace font; every other monospace font I’ve encountered that is labelled “serif” is actually a slab serif. It has a proper italic face as well, which is a less rare, but it’s a functional italic face rather than ornamental. It comes with some interesting variants, most notably Poly which is not fully monospaced, adjusting the wid…

It looks quite similar to golang font: https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts It has serifs and true italics. Might be an interesting free alternative.

[deleted]

Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive

#68
post #4

One of my favorites is PragmataPro [0] (with powerline glyphs) and I'm sad it's not there. I guess they can't use proprietary fonts. PragmataPro was so weird when I started using it but it has grown on me and now I have a hard time switching to a terminal that uses something else. In any case, if you're like me and you look at the terminal screen for hours on end every single day, find some font that won't tire your…

$60 for a font...? Is there something wrong with Hasklig, Fira Code, or Inconsolata?

There's nothing wrong with the original IBM VGA console font, for that matter. Font perception is a very subjective thing, though.

Also, I think increase in screen resolution contributes somewhat. I find that I'm a lot pickier about fonts after getting a 4K display.

Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive

#69
post #31

It looks like these are all monospaced fonts. I realize that most programmers use monospaced fonts, but I personally find proportional fonts to be much more readable and pleasing to my eye. I would be really interested in a similar font comparison that included proportional fonts that are suitable for programming. Right now my favorite is Trebuchet MS. This renders beautifully on the high-DPI displays I use, and it h…

I'm curious to know how you started using proportional fonts for coding. All of the tooling for writing code defaults to monospace, so what started you coding in a different style?

One of the early proponents of using proportional fonts for code was Bjarne Stroustroup - his "The C++ Programming Language" books all do that, and he briefly explains it in the intro as being more readable, and urges the readers to give it a go. I wasn't convinced, personally, but the idea was already around then.

Re: Programming Fonts – Test Drive

#70
Slightly OT: Iosevka Term Light is my favorite font for the terminal. It looks pretty on a HiDPI screen. Also, it’s the only font that wouldn’t break box-drawing Unicode glyphs for me, e. g. those used by the tree command.
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