Live data from Hacker News

Programming fonts

s9w.github.io

41–50 of 72 posts

Re: Programming fonts

#41
post #40
post #32

Interesting project, but some of these look a bit... wrong to me. For example, ProFont is my favorite bitmap programming font and the renderer used makes it look bad. Just loaded it up in my Terminal.app to show how it /should/ look: [0]. Also while I'm at it, some cool fonts not mentioned that I think deserve some attention are tewi[1] and ProggyTiny[2]. Tewi glyphs are particularly nice [3]. [0]: http://i.imgur.com…

hmm in what way do you think it looks bad? I just double checked and the screenshots on the page are correct. I can see that some letters (MN) are too close together on the site. I'll try a different font version to see if that fixes it. Thanks for the suggestions! I'll have a look and add them all if they work. But my internet right now is damaged so it might take some time.

Yeah I think it was just the strange kerning and size that it was displayed in. I know ProFont has bitmap sizes other than 9 (10, 12, 14, 24, etc.) but I'm not accustomed to seeing any other than 9 used for programming is all.

I have a patched version of profont for windows that correctly supports the powerline glyphs which I use in mintty. In the end, when I have everything configured (ClearType disabled, MacType excludes mintty.exe), it looks exactly like my above OS X screenshot.

Re: Programming fonts

#42
post #15

Ah this has reminded me how awesome gdipp is [0]. For those who don't know, it's an alternative renderer for Windows that makes the fonts look a lot better. The only downsides are that it hasn't been updated in years and that it breaks the font rendering in a few applications (notably Chrome and Skype). [0] https://code.google.com/p/gdipp/

This is a matter of choice I suppose. For me gdipp (or mac ftm) rendered fonts look like just crap. Never been typographic junkie though...

It also depends on the DPI of your display. The classic Windows font renderer sacrifices accuracy for readability on low DPI displays. If the stroke of a font was going to be 1.3 pixels wide at a given siW Windows will just crop the extra 0.3 to give a crisp edge on low DPI displays. Unfortunately on HiDPI displays this can needlessly make the font stroke very thin.

Re: Programming fonts

#43
post #27

It's great that we have so many choices of great programming fonts nowadays. What's everyone's font of choice? I've been using Consolas for the last few years.

I've been using Input Mono for a few years now. I think this is the longest I've stuck with a particular monospace font.

http://input.fontbureau.com/preview/?size=14&language=python...

Re: Programming fonts

#44
post #32

Interesting project, but some of these look a bit... wrong to me. For example, ProFont is my favorite bitmap programming font and the renderer used makes it look bad. Just loaded it up in my Terminal.app to show how it /should/ look: [0]. Also while I'm at it, some cool fonts not mentioned that I think deserve some attention are tewi[1] and ProggyTiny[2]. Tewi glyphs are particularly nice [3]. [0]: http://i.imgur.com…

Tewi looks a lot like montecarlo, no?

Re: Programming fonts

#45
post #27

It's great that we have so many choices of great programming fonts nowadays. What's everyone's font of choice? I've been using Consolas for the last few years.

I'm a huge fan of Liberation Mono. I've been using it for years -whenever I try to change up my terminal a bit by playing around with other fonts, I always end up back where I started.

Re: Programming fonts

#46
post #27

It's great that we have so many choices of great programming fonts nowadays. What's everyone's font of choice? I've been using Consolas for the last few years.

Roboto Mono - I live in jetbrains product (intellij, pycharm, phpstorm) and the font rendering on Linux is pretty bad yet Roboto Mono actually manages to look good, I'd post a screenshot but I'm away from my machine at the moment.

Re: Programming fonts

#47
I wish that more fonts had a semi-bold version, like Source Code Pro. It's one of the main reasons I use that font, since it looks good at smaller sizes, but still allows the syntax highlighting colors to stand out. You can tell the difference between black and blue at a glance.

Re: Programming fonts

#48
post #27

It's great that we have so many choices of great programming fonts nowadays. What's everyone's font of choice? I've been using Consolas for the last few years.

I've been using Bitstream/DejaVu Sans Mono for years as I really like their choice for 1Il| but this page made it easy for me to find some alternatives to try. Ubuntu mono and Monoid both stand out as looking good to me (M+ is a close third, but has larger line spacing than I'm used to).

Re: Programming fonts

#50
post #24
post #4

Looks pretty neat! - Can you render the fonts at higher DPI? It doesn't look good on a retina screen at all. Ex: http://i.imgur.com/HiclAPI.png

When you say Retina you mean high dpi since retina is just a trade marked word for dpi of 220 inches or higher and means different things at different models. Sorry to be a stickler but Retina is a worthless term and just causes confusion.

If you really want to be a stickler you should use PPI, not DPI.
Post reply on HN