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Top Programming Fonts

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61–70 of 174 posts

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#61

All of these fonts look cool, but in Eclipse on Linux (and other GTK-based text editors), the font renderer adds a few pixels to the width for bold text, which screws up the monospacing. Has anyone been able to figure out a way to disable this? Example from Eclipse: http://i.imgur.com/F3PhS.png

There is some discussion on this bug report, and a possible temporary fix. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=69253

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#62
post #22

I say this every time this discussion comes up but I do feel it bears repeating: I switched away from monospaced a while ago and I am never going back. I encourage you to try something like Verdana for a week just to see how it feels.

I've been using Verdana for coding for years, with some modifications. I've changed the parentheses, braces, operators etc. to be more prominent - that makes it just perfect for me. Edit: screenshot here: http://i.imgur.com/xv5oz.png

Oh, nice job making the encapsulating characters extra bold.

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#63
post #25

I don't wish to troll, but I see this a lot and I can't for the life of me figure out how anyone needs to give this any more thought than 'monospace, next question?', despite many explanations each time. Can someone shed some light on any advantages they feel are of a reasonably significant importance, and why? I mean, I can see plenty of advantages, but they're all so negligible they're not worth even the time it ta…

There's only a few things I look for in a programming font:

Monospacing And being able to see these as different glyphs easily: O0I1l

Other than that, I don't put too much though into it.

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#64
post #25

I don't wish to troll, but I see this a lot and I can't for the life of me figure out how anyone needs to give this any more thought than 'monospace, next question?', despite many explanations each time. Can someone shed some light on any advantages they feel are of a reasonably significant importance, and why? I mean, I can see plenty of advantages, but they're all so negligible they're not worth even the time it ta…

90% of it is really just how purdy it is. Picking the 'right' font will make you feel better when you stare at it all day. It's like how functionally, you could compose a 6000 word essay in comic sans, but really rather not. But in other cases, depending on your display size/setup, I guess there will be advantages to certain fonts. Now, mind you, the 10 on this list are all 'good' so you won't really see it between t…

I find it funny how so many developers I talk to online have this aversion to... well prettiness.

As if form and function is a zero-sum game. Or there's something inefficient about caring about aesthetics. What's wrong with wanting something to be aesthetically pleasing?

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#65
post #25

I don't wish to troll, but I see this a lot and I can't for the life of me figure out how anyone needs to give this any more thought than 'monospace, next question?', despite many explanations each time. Can someone shed some light on any advantages they feel are of a reasonably significant importance, and why? I mean, I can see plenty of advantages, but they're all so negligible they're not worth even the time it ta…

Brightens up otherwise dull days. I think that's all it is. People work better when they occasionally give their computer a makeover, and everything feels fresh.

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#66
post #17

I say this every time this discussion comes up but I do feel it bears repeating: I switched away from monospaced a while ago and I am never going back. I encourage you to try something like Verdana for a week just to see how it feels.

Well I've just tried it for 10 minutes, and I have to say it seems to work better that i initially expected/feared. So you might not be as crazy as you sound :) I might actually give it a few days and see what happens.

This will affect you differently depending on what language you use and whether you like to align things in columns. Think of how some people format C functions, with each parameter on a new line aligned at the open paren.

Personally I find that kind of alignment unnecessary and creates too much busywork. Proportional fonts prevent you from even trying. (Unless your editor supports elastic tabstops, but since very few do this is moot.)

FWIW, I program in Georgia, until I find a serif font I like better. EVERYONE comments on it.

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#68
Several others here have suggested my favorite font already, the standard 6x13 "Fixed" bitmap font.

Pretty much every Linux machine has a version of this, but most modern Debians (and probably others) that ship with fontconfig have bitmapped fonts turned off by default for programs that use fontconfig for their font info (i.e., not xterm, but gnome-terminal, usually gvim, et cetera).

If you want to use Fixed and other bitmapped fonts and they're just not there, take a look in /etc/fonts/conf.d for a file named (something like) 70-no-bitmaps.conf, a symblink to the same filename in /etc/fonts/conf.avail. If you remove the symblink from /etc/fonts/conf.d and instead

    ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-yes-bitmaps.conf \
          /etc/fonts/conf.d
fontconfig will cache bitmapped fonts for you. Then you'll just have to get it to update your cache with

    fc-cache -f -r -v
and you should be able to use bitmapped fonts like Fixed.

You can look for other bitmapped fonts on your system with

    fc-list ":scalable=false" family pixelsize
which prints out the family name and the sizes for which the bitmaps are available.

    set guifont=Fixed\ Medium\ Semi-Condensed\ 10
makes gvim look precisely like a terminal for me.

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#69
In this article only fixed-width fonts are presented, while there are ever more and more developers using proportional fonts nowadays—because they're much easier to read.

On my unix system, for example, I use Vera Sans: http://www.michielovertoom.com/pictures/luyt-desktop.png

On my windows system I use Comic Sans to code, but I haven't got a screenie ready ;-)

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#70
post #22

I say this every time this discussion comes up but I do feel it bears repeating: I switched away from monospaced a while ago and I am never going back. I encourage you to try something like Verdana for a week just to see how it feels.

I've been using Verdana for coding for years, with some modifications. I've changed the parentheses, braces, operators etc. to be more prominent - that makes it just perfect for me. Edit: screenshot here: http://i.imgur.com/xv5oz.png

Would you be willing to share your modified font?

Also, what color scheme is that?

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