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Dev Fonts

devfonts.gafi.dev

261–270 of 342 posts

Re: Dev Fonts

#261
After years of playing around different dev fonts, Iosevka finally closed the door on other challengers for me. Basically a perfect item.

Re: Dev Fonts

#262
one of my first checks for a dev font is typing "lst vs 1st" (list vs first).

In some the lowercase "l" looks almost the same as a 1 (one). Some will make the lower case "l" curved, but then some (like Iosevka) will remove the bottom bar for a one.

Re: Dev Fonts

#264
post #257

My favourite monospaced font is Triplicate https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html >: the only true serif monospace that I know of (though I have a vague feeling I found one other at some point). Every other serif monospace I know of is a slab serif. Triplicate’s variable stroke thickness is also exceedingly rare in monospaced fonts; almost everyone goes for uniform stroke thickness, as is customary with sans…

I'm not clear on the outcry against ligatures. This is a client-side setting and not committed to code, is that right? If so, this is like prescribing that we should use dark-mode over light-mode because I like it. Now during the pandemic we might screenshare more often so I can disable it for that, but for development on my own time on my own screen it's nonyabizness.

I was going to complain about them because there are a few fonts there I like a lot, but not the ligatures. Wasn't sure if it was = or == or === in the samples.

Re: Dev Fonts

#267
post #236

There's a certain style of programming font, I think due to narrow strokes and sharp curves that I at least find universally ugly and often hard to read. From this list Monoid, Iosveka, Anonymous Pro, and Share Tech Mono at least fall into that category. I think it's meant to be sort of a callback to bitmap fonts? I know the Linux console font (terminus) looks similar, but that's clearly due to technical limitations.…

I've been using Anonymous Pro as my primary code font for at least 5 years now.

I came to Anonymous Pro through the path of previously using tewi [0]. I was big on the whole linux customization / "ricing" scene in my early years of university, and because of how my desk was set up, i was close enough to my computer to be able to read it. I ran Arch, with tewi, at a 9 point font size. I just liked how it looked.

Eventually my desk setup changed and having such a small font was no longer viable. I went with Anonymous Pro because I found it to be similar, but also easier to read at larger sizes. For a while I coded primarily in vim, so maybe there was something about just setting it once in the terminal config and having what I needed. I also picked it because patched versions existed with powerline symbols, which I was into at the time.

I now primarily use VS Code on Windows, but I still use Anonymous Pro. I think the narrow strokes and the sharp cruves that you dislike are actually easier for me to read. They give characters a kind of crisp shape, and I find that helpful in distinguishing which characters are which. When I look at the colleciton of fonts, ones like Cascadia, Ubuntu Mono, and especially Nova Mono all look awful to me, because of how rounded they are. I'm also in the crowd of people who dislike ligatures in programming fonts

If I were to pick any of the fonts from this list to try, I would probably pick Hack or Noto Mono for something a bit more robust, or Source Code Pro for something similar to the slenderness of Anonymous Pro. But I think the more important thing is knowing what you like and picking one and settling on it. It surprised me when I went back to my dotfiles and I was looking at screenshots, just how long I've been using the same font. But it makes things easy.

[0] https://github.com/lucy/tewi-font

Re: Dev Fonts

#268

My favourite monospaced font is Triplicate https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html >: the only true serif monospace that I know of (though I have a vague feeling I found one other at some point). Every other serif monospace I know of is a slab serif. Triplicate’s variable stroke thickness is also exceedingly rare in monospaced fonts; almost everyone goes for uniform stroke thickness, as is customary with sans…

Re:ligatures:

Unless you're programming in something like Brainfuck, ligatures are simply not going to fail because the operators that have ligatures are pretty much universal. The situation of mixing up ligatures and their respective unicode chars is also nonsense, as those characters aren't typable and will only ever be used in strings, so there's no way you'd not know which it is and it's pretty easy to check anyways.

Programming ligatures provide a tangible benefit to many of us, so the author's insistence that they are a terrible idea is simply ridiculous (although, reading through some other articles on the site, not too surprising, as the site is 80% good common-sense advice and 20% poorly explained personal opinions being treated as gospel).

Re: Dev Fonts

#269
post #115

Another great aggregator that has been around for a long time and has 100+ programming fonts: https://www.programmingfonts.org/

I wonder if both these sites use some of the same code - in both ProgrammingFonts and DevFonts the language switcher is broken for me (Firefox, mac).

They both use https://codemirror.net/

Re: Dev Fonts

#270

My favourite monospaced font is Triplicate https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html >: the only true serif monospace that I know of (though I have a vague feeling I found one other at some point). Every other serif monospace I know of is a slab serif. Triplicate’s variable stroke thickness is also exceedingly rare in monospaced fonts; almost everyone goes for uniform stroke thickness, as is customary with sans…

“ligatures in programming fonts are a terrible idea” I agree as well with the point about ligatures, but I find funny that the advice comes from a site that thinks straight up normal text with no hover, no distinct color, no distinct font and no underline is a good way to signal linked pages https://i.imgur.com/9iVMfgD.png (who would have guessed Racket was a link?)

"Ligatures in programming fonts—a misguided trend I was hoping would collapse under its own illogic."

The same could be said about so many programming conventions most people take for granted. Sometimes programmers are their own worst enemies. "just because you can doesn't mean you should" is probably the #1 rule of programming, at least for me, and ligatures definitely fit into that category.

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