I don’t know what’s with this font, but I can’t get away from it. I tried Monaspace because it looks really nice, as well as a few other programmer fonts. But DejaVu is just so sharp and readable, and it makes the code look slightly less busy.
A lot of modern fonts don’t look that great when not on a HiDPI “retina” display.
I use SauceCode Pro (variant of SourceCode Pro with nerdfonts stuff). I’ve given up on changing it because everytime I do I find stuff that’s “non-standard” in the fonts I test and it bugs the hell out of me. @ signs are the absolute worst offenders, which is weird because they have a very uniform look everywhere that’s not a specialized “programming” monospace font.
The standard @ symbol has four horizontal lines and worse the right side of the “a” is a vertical line contained inside a circle without touching it.
In a variable width font it’s often fully twice as wide as a regular “a” character. The variable width font lemmy uses for example, at least as rendered by my computer has six pixels for a lowercase “a” and also six pixels for the small one contained inside the “@” symbol, then another six pixels of width for the circle around it.
That’s an impossible task in a fixed width code font where users typically choose a size so small that the regular “a” can’t be reduced any further while still being readable.
Which is why basically all code fonts (including Source Code Pro) cheat and modify the symbol so the inner circle overlaps the outer one on the right edge. Some of them do that better than others at inventing their own variant of @.
I was using Inconsolata for about 5 years, then switched to Inconsolata-g when that came out, for another 5 years. But it’s a pretty old font and is TrueType and it’s hinting is bad, so doesn’t render well on Linux and it misses out on a lot of new font features.
In 2019 I went hunting for a new favourite font, and tried out a whole bunch, giving each one a week in my IDE to really get to know it. During that time I realised I had a bunch of basic requirements for a font that some do better than others:
Similar characters should be distinct: eg, uppercase O and number 0. Uppercase I, lowercase l, and number 1. It’s weird how many popular coding fonts fail to make these clear.
Not too wide, and not too narrow. You’d think monospace fonts are all around the same size horizontally, but a standard 80-column slab of code can vary greatly in screen space width depending on the font, some are much too wide. Consolas is an example that is too wide. I like to have the option to tile three code panes side-by-side on a 1080P screen.
Easy to read. For some reason a lot of coding-specific fonts affect my ability to quickly and easily read the code, and some give me a headache.
I realised that my use of Inconsolata for such a long time in the early stages of my career definitely shaped my preferences. I was looking for something similar to Inconsolata. That was when I discovered Fantasque Sans Mono. It’s a kind of weird looking font, maybe a bit too playful for a serious coding font, but I found I could read and parse code much faster (maybe it helps with mild dyslexia?), each letter is very distinct from every other. It has elements of handwriting, it has elements of a dyslexic font, it has similarities to Inconsolata.
I’ve been using Fantasque (with Nerdfonts mixins) for 4 years now. Since then there has been a renaissance of code fonts, like Jet Brains Mono, and Fira Code. I like those, they are good fonts, but I keep going back to Fantasque, it feels so comfortable to use.
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Default VS Code font, whatever that is. I prefer no ligatures; I find them distracting.
Me too. I don’t understand why people like ligatures.
IIRC, should be Cascadia Code.
Also, I’m the opposite. I love ligatures, I feel they make my code cleaner and remove extra noise.
https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/
Been using Input Mono for the past 5 or so years.
Webdings.
I was expecting someone to say wingdings when I posted the question, but this is one better 😁
I’ve used IBM Plex Mono for a long time. Currently giving github’s new Monaspace a try.
IBM Plex Mono is such a fancy, refined font. The line spacing is a bit too high for my liking though 😞
Cascadia Code is my go to
DejaVu Sans Mono
I don’t know what’s with this font, but I can’t get away from it. I tried Monaspace because it looks really nice, as well as a few other programmer fonts. But DejaVu is just so sharp and readable, and it makes the code look slightly less busy.
A lot of modern fonts don’t look that great when not on a HiDPI “retina” display.
DVSM is timeless. IMO Hack makes a few subtle improvements like the zero, i/l, and some punctuation characters
I’ve been trying a new font every few months for years - and then I discovered Intel One Mono:
https://github.com/intel/intel-one-mono
Hard to describe what I like about the font but it just feels perfect.
I have been partial to Proggy fonts for over a decade
http://proggyfonts.net/index.php?menu=download
The one that comes with the IDE, because I don’t really care.
That is fine as long as it is one where l1I are easy to distinguish.
so brave
I use SauceCode Pro (variant of SourceCode Pro with nerdfonts stuff). I’ve given up on changing it because everytime I do I find stuff that’s “non-standard” in the fonts I test and it bugs the hell out of me.
@signs are the absolute worst offenders, which is weird because they have a very uniform look everywhere that’s not a specialized “programming” monospace font.The standard @ symbol has four horizontal lines and worse the right side of the “a” is a vertical line contained inside a circle without touching it.
In a variable width font it’s often fully twice as wide as a regular “a” character. The variable width font lemmy uses for example, at least as rendered by my computer has six pixels for a lowercase “a” and also six pixels for the small one contained inside the “@” symbol, then another six pixels of width for the circle around it.
That’s an impossible task in a fixed width code font where users typically choose a size so small that the regular “a” can’t be reduced any further while still being readable.
Which is why basically all code fonts (including Source Code Pro) cheat and modify the symbol so the inner circle overlaps the outer one on the right edge. Some of them do that better than others at inventing their own variant of @.
I was using Inconsolata for about 5 years, then switched to Inconsolata-g when that came out, for another 5 years. But it’s a pretty old font and is TrueType and it’s hinting is bad, so doesn’t render well on Linux and it misses out on a lot of new font features.
In 2019 I went hunting for a new favourite font, and tried out a whole bunch, giving each one a week in my IDE to really get to know it. During that time I realised I had a bunch of basic requirements for a font that some do better than others:
Similar characters should be distinct: eg, uppercase O and number 0. Uppercase I, lowercase l, and number 1. It’s weird how many popular coding fonts fail to make these clear.
Not too wide, and not too narrow. You’d think monospace fonts are all around the same size horizontally, but a standard 80-column slab of code can vary greatly in screen space width depending on the font, some are much too wide. Consolas is an example that is too wide. I like to have the option to tile three code panes side-by-side on a 1080P screen.
Easy to read. For some reason a lot of coding-specific fonts affect my ability to quickly and easily read the code, and some give me a headache.
I realised that my use of Inconsolata for such a long time in the early stages of my career definitely shaped my preferences. I was looking for something similar to Inconsolata. That was when I discovered Fantasque Sans Mono. It’s a kind of weird looking font, maybe a bit too playful for a serious coding font, but I found I could read and parse code much faster (maybe it helps with mild dyslexia?), each letter is very distinct from every other. It has elements of handwriting, it has elements of a dyslexic font, it has similarities to Inconsolata.
I’ve been using Fantasque (with Nerdfonts mixins) for 4 years now. Since then there has been a renaissance of code fonts, like Jet Brains Mono, and Fira Code. I like those, they are good fonts, but I keep going back to Fantasque, it feels so comfortable to use.
Fantasque was my favourite before Recursive. Kinda miss it still …
Whatever my distro defaults to when i put mono in suckless terminal’s config.h
I love ligatures and Fira Code (retina) is the best and absolutely comfortable for me.
Can’t beat Iosevka in my opinion. I use the Term variant for my shell as well.
Amen. I’m currently using Iosvmata, a custom build of Iosevka.