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Lesser Known Coding Fonts

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Re: Lesser Known Coding Fonts

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kerning is easier in your eyes, and is also much more space efficient. The only drawback is the inability to do ascii art.

While I wouldn't say it's THAT significant, there is one other advantage to fixed-width fonts that I've experienced. Due to the fact that they align vertically, sometimes they expose mistakes if you're constructing data in a table-like fashion. Or when you have a bunch of copy/pasted lines that differ only in the parameter values. Like, "Hey wait a minute... this line is 1 char wider than the previous one. Oh, whoops…

This is because we don’t have any decent rich formatting options available for code in a plain text file. You could totally find those errors in an excel spreadsheet, and excel doesn’t default to using fixed-width typewriter fonts.

Re: Lesser Known Coding Fonts

#113

I see Input Mono is mentioned, but I actually really like using Input Sans, also from Font Bureau. It's a proportional coding font. I feel like I'm living in the future. You can get it here: https://input.fontbureau.com And amazingly, you can personalize your font on download, such as choosing dotted vs slashed zeroes. Not free, but free for personal, non-commercial use. (Check the terms)

For ~6 months I used Comic Sans as my single font system-wide - like, for everything. Everywhere in the system UI, code, even on webpages (Firefox lets you disable CSS font selectors). The only exception was the terminal, which got messed up with non-monospaced fonts. It was actually surprisingly great. Then as soon as I got a 4k monitor Comic Sans started to look very ugly - if not for that, I would still be using i…

If you liked that, then you may get a kick out of Comic Code, a fixed width variation of Comic Sans designed for coding:

https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/tabular-type-foundry/comic-cod...

I've been using it for a few months and really enjoy it!

Re: Lesser Known Coding Fonts

#114
post #99

I would really like to use a proportional font that has coding ligatures (such as -> becomes an arrow). Is there such a thing? Is there a way I could combine two fonts, a normal proportional font, and the ligatures from something like Fira Code , to create a hybrid font, perhaps with a script?

There are projects like this one, which add ligatures to non-ligature fonts. Maybe it will help.

https://github.com/kiliman/operator-mono-lig

Re: Lesser Known Coding Fonts

#115

Every thread about programming fonts is not complete without mentioning the wonderful website https://app.programmingfonts.org (no affiliation, I just find it really useful) which lists all the free programming-related fonts with live preview (for example every single font from the article, and every one mentioned so far in every comment in this thread is already there in the app) - it allows quick one-click preview…

That is a truly fantastic site but it doesn't mention https://dank.sh/ which I first heard about in this thread. Just to nitpick. But I am right now going through every one of those fonts in the app to compare with the one I've used for almost a decade now.

[deleted]

Re: Lesser Known Coding Fonts

#117
post #38

This is definitely missing Dank: https://dank.sh It's my favorite programming font, made by a good friend of mine. It has awesome ligatures and the italic version is beautiful, similar to Operator Mono!

I really like it overall, but I think the f going below the baseline and the italic l not starting at the baseline would drive me crazy. I wonder how hard it would be for me to change just those characters.

Easy. A basic font editor can do it. I for example experimented with changing the weight of parenthesis, thinking they're not evil in Lisp, just tuned badly for that purpose.

Re: Lesser Known Coding Fonts

#118
post #85

I settled on Inconsolata-g. I hate curly i's and l's. I've only got two minor quibbles with it, I prefer a slashed zero instead of a dotted one, and the tilde ~ and back quote ` are a bit small/weak.

Somewhere I saw a version of Inconsolata with the slashed zero. There was a site at one time that collected all the Inconsolata permutations in one place, but I don't have it offhand.

I'm revising Inconsolata, making it into a variable font, and would like to gather data on the variants out there so I can make it satisfy the largest number of users. Feel free to file an issue on https://github.com/googlefonts/Inconsolata simply stating your preference.

Re: Lesser Known Coding Fonts

#119

Every thread about programming fonts is not complete without mentioning the wonderful website https://app.programmingfonts.org (no affiliation, I just find it really useful) which lists all the free programming-related fonts with live preview (for example every single font from the article, and every one mentioned so far in every comment in this thread is already there in the app) - it allows quick one-click preview…

what I don't like about thus site is that there are no large bitmap fonts (not even the x11 standard bitmaps, which are great)

Re: Lesser Known Coding Fonts

#120

My favorite coding font is Monaco. Feels like the cleanest of them.

I can agree with this. It's especially wonderful without aliasing on an even multiple Retina display. For example, 2x on a 5k Monitor (iMac, LG Ultrafine) or MacBook Pro. It's simple, clean, tried and true.
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