Top Programming Fonts • Hacker News Board

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#111

Post by sek » Wed, May 25, 2011, 6:13 PM UTC

Karn wrote: post #22

kristiandupont wrote: post #11

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

Also interested, standard Verdana in my terminal is unusable. Your screenshot looks awesome.

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#112

Post by maxer » Wed, May 25, 2011, 6:18 PM UTC

RexRollman wrote: post #79

Although I am not a programmer, I do prefer monospaced fonts, and my favorite right now is the bitmap font Tamsyn. I recently discovered it via the Arch Linux wiki and I now have it set up as the font for my Xterm windows (set via .Xdefaults). My favorite TTF monospaced font has got to be Consolas, which I use in Windows as the font for Foobar2000 and Notepad2 (I keep everything in plain text).

i use notepad++ with Consolas under the zenburn theme, for clarity its the best, especially with long coding days

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#113

Post by husted » Wed, May 25, 2011, 6:21 PM UTC

kristiandupont wrote: post #11

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 do all my programming in Source Insight and it lets you switch between monospaced and proportional fonts with a keystroke. I find it easier to read code in proportional mode but find editing is best done in monospace mode.

I don't want to start an editor war but Source Insight is the best editor I've ever used and that includes Emacs and Vim. Yes I said it :-)

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#114

Post by kwantam » Wed, May 25, 2011, 6:24 PM UTC

windsurfer wrote: post #109

kwantam wrote: post #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 othe…

What if you have a high DPI monitor? Isn't that too hard to see?

My desktop's monitor is about 100 dpi and it looks fine. I have a laptop with a 125dpi screen and a netbook with a 150dpi screen, and it looks fine there, too.

Just tried it under a Debian chroot on my phone (N900) and it was tiny but very readable on the 250DPI screen as well.

As this is entirely subjective, the answer for some people might be that it's unusable above 75dpi, while for me it's fine up to >3x that.

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#115

Post by Jach » Wed, May 25, 2011, 7:00 PM UTC

I'm a fan of courier, though my favorite became Bitstream Vera Sans Mono some time ago after I was searching through my fonts for a better font. I like it a lot because it makes it easy to distinguish between O and 0, and l and 1.

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#116

Post by Athtar » Wed, May 25, 2011, 7:01 PM UTC

This is not directly related to fonts but for anyone using Visual Studio, this might be helpful: http://studiostyl.es/

It's a website that collects Visual Studio color schemes, so that people can download and install them rather than spending hours customizing their IDE to look like they want it to. Assuming they like one of the available schemes, of course.

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#117

Post by ugh » Wed, May 25, 2011, 7:08 PM UTC

nsfmc wrote: post #93

kristiandupont wrote: post #11

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.

There's a few things that i think you're reacting to (i think, because i've had similar feelings, but i could totally be wrong). The first is that Verdana is really nicely hinted, which means that, unlike most other fonts out there, Verdana has the advantage of always technically looking sharp. The second is that Verdana is mostly monolinear, like Courier or Andale or any of traditional monospaces, there's only the s…

I don't know. Verdana and style? Verdana?

Letter Gothic, for example, has tons more style than most other fonts, proportional or not. Verdana, in that context, is to me just as to quite a bit more boring than nearly all the fonts mentioned in the article. (Courier excluded.)

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#118

Post by ginsweater » Wed, May 25, 2011, 7:10 PM UTC

This is the article that introduced me to monofur, which I dearly love even though it seems fairly unpopular. Take a look[1] and you'll either think that lowercase L is a terrible idea or exactly the thing to distinguish it from the number 1. The rounded friendliness distinguishes it from all the other fonts I use; now when I see monofur (in the zenburn color scheme), it says "programming time" to my brain.

[1] http://www.dafont.com/monofur.font

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#119

Post by kennywinker » Wed, May 25, 2011, 7:13 PM UTC

dagw wrote: post #17

kristiandupont wrote: post #11

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.

The first few days feel a little weird, but I tried it almost a year ago and now I'm stick in Times New Roman.

I actually mix a bit of monospaced in... I have Xcode make comments monospaced. Which is nice, because it makes them fade to the background a bit.

Re: Top Programming Fonts

#120

Post by roadnottaken » Wed, May 25, 2011, 7:16 PM UTC

Jach wrote: post #115

I'm a fan of courier, though my favorite became Bitstream Vera Sans Mono some time ago after I was searching through my fonts for a better font. I like it a lot because it makes it easy to distinguish between O and 0, and l and 1.

Me too. I think this is default on the Ubuntu terminal. I liked it so much I brought it over to my Windows computer at work and use it with Putty.