Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is your default font for coding and terminal?

news.ycombinator.com

81–90 of 104 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is your default font for coding and terminal?

#82
post #78

macOS, iTerm, Menlo Menlo isn't the perfect font, but it's good enough and I wasted way too much time trying to find the perfect font. So to force myself from fiddling with fonts, I just stick with Menlo (This is also the same reason why I prefer macOS over Linux for my OS: forces me to fiddle less with customization because it has less). JetBrains Mono is quite nice as well. I don't always switch it off when using J…

> This is also the same reason why I prefer macOS over Linux for my OS: forces me to fiddle less with customization because it has less

Similar here, although it has more to do with the defaults on macOS being generally decent and needing less fiddling with. I can have a brand new Mac ready for productive work in half an hour tops without any maintenance of dotfile repos or config transfer. Fine tuning things to a fully preferred state takes a little longer, but it's not even remotely critical and can be pushed off until I have some downtime due to being blocked.

Re: Ask HN: What is your default font for coding and terminal?

#84
post #58

Offtopic. Something seems wrong with HN. My newest comments don't show up under "threads". And curiously when I click on "threads" my karma counter is a few points lower than when I click on a random comment thread.

(it works now)

Re: Ask HN: What is your default font for coding and terminal?

#87

I used the Terminus bitmap font until a year ago because I found it really clear and sharp even on small sizes. Since bitmap fonts are not that well supported anymore, I switched to JetBrains Mono for both terminal and IDE. I started using JetBrains Mono in my IDEs as soon as it came out.

I migrated from Terminus to Iosevka Regular Mono for the same reason.

For many years, Terminus was kicking the ass for Mac and Windows users that watched over my shoulder ;-)

Re: Ask HN: What is your default font for coding and terminal?

#88
post #78

macOS, iTerm, Menlo Menlo isn't the perfect font, but it's good enough and I wasted way too much time trying to find the perfect font. So to force myself from fiddling with fonts, I just stick with Menlo (This is also the same reason why I prefer macOS over Linux for my OS: forces me to fiddle less with customization because it has less). JetBrains Mono is quite nice as well. I don't always switch it off when using J…

> This is also the same reason why I prefer macOS over Linux for my OS: forces me to fiddle less with customization because it has less Similar here, although it has more to do with the defaults on macOS being generally decent and needing less fiddling with. I can have a brand new Mac ready for productive work in half an hour tops without any maintenance of dotfile repos or config transfer. Fine tuning things to a fu…

Agree. I know I use Menlo on macOS but I’ve never needed to change it. Same for Consolas when I used Windows, these fonts are just sane defaults.

On any Linux I tried, the default mono fonts were always so awful it would trigger my fiddling nerve. They’re either too wide or too thin or too round, they never seem to get the perfect balance of Menlo or Consolas

Re: Ask HN: What is your default font for coding and terminal?

#89
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is also the same reason why I prefer macOS over Linux for my OS: forces me to fiddle less with customization because it has less Similar here, although it has more to do with the defaults on macOS being generally decent and needing less fiddling with. I can have a brand new Mac ready for productive work in half an hour tops without any maintenance of dotfile repos or config transfer. Fine tuning things to a fu…

Agree. I know I use Menlo on macOS but I’ve never needed to change it. Same for Consolas when I used Windows, these fonts are just sane defaults. On any Linux I tried, the default mono fonts were always so awful it would trigger my fiddling nerve. They’re either too wide or too thin or too round, they never seem to get the perfect balance of Menlo or Consolas

It's been improving in a lot of distros recently but it used to be that the default proportional font on most Linux distros was Vera Sans or DejaVu sans which always drove me nuts because of how wide the glyphs of those fonts are compared to just about any UI font used in commercial operating systems in the past two or three decades. It was enough of a peeve that when it came to Linux distros, I used to be inclined toward Ubuntu and Ubuntu variants for the simple fact that they had Ubuntu Sans, a much better UI font, preinstalled.

Re: Ask HN: What is your default font for coding and terminal?

#90
post #73

I've tried a lot of different monospaced fonts, but I've settled on these 3: IDE: • Cascadia Mono - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/cascadia-c... • CaskaydiaCove Nerd Font (as a fallback) - https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/tree/master/patched-... Terminal: • Hack Nerd Font - https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/tree/master/patched-...

I also use Hack Nerd Font.
Post reply on HN