Or as some would say, “Good-bye Courier New.”
This conversation in Typographica suggests different types of typefaces to use instead of the default Courier font while you code for easier reading, use, and dammit, it’s just prettier. It started in November of 2003, but the suggestions still continue!
From the thread, I found the wonderful Anonymous font from Mark Simonson studio. I now use it in HomeSite, and how sweet it is.
Hat tip: kottke.
edit: Five minutes after I posted this, I found a sizeable resevoir of Programmer’s Fonts. Enjoy!
I use Lucida Console, personally. Much easier to work with than any of the pseudo-typerwriter fonts, but still nicely monospaced
I used to use Lucida Console too, but Anonymous was just much nicer. :-)
Anonymous looks great =) But there doesn’t appear to be a linux version, boooo ;) Maybe it’s time to get to work.
I’m currently using Profont, and while not really a programmer’s font terminus is also very nice if your eyes are glued to the screen all day.
For the past year, I only code with Bitstream Vera. I’ve found it to be absolutely wonderful gaze upon all day long.
By the way, the above link to typographica is incorrect.
Thanks Roshambo. Fixed the link.
I can’t remember where I first found out about Anonymous, but that’s what I’ve been using for well over a year now. It’s the best I’ve seen so far, although I’d like to check out some others.
For some reason I can never get away from Fixedsys. I’ve tried and tried, but I’m hooked.
I’m with Roshambo, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono for me. I like Anonymous, but its bold and italic/oblique aren’t as refined. Both are infinitely better than Courier, though.
OMG, this is terrific. I’ve just installed “Anonymous” on my development machine (Windows) and, with ClearType enabled, I almost immediately fell in love with it.
I look at code for hours (sometimes even days) on end. I haven’t worked with it for an extended period yet (I’ve just browsed some source code to get a “feel” for the font), but I can tell that I’m going be comfortable using Anonymous.
I love the way it renders “0″ (zero) with the traditional slash through – to distinguish it from “O” (upper-case “o”)… this alone will be invaluable to me. I also particularly like the rendering of the other numbers (1-9).
My only niggle (thus far) is the “#” character, which is a little too small for my tastes.
Great heads-up though. Thank you very much.
Argh!!! “Anonymous” doesn’t render the tilde (“~”) character very well. This is a real shame since that character is used a lot in Perl code (Perl is my preferred language).
I have ended up following Roshambo and Charles Roper in adopting “Bitstream Vera Sans Mono” as my programming font.
This font differentiates “0″ from “O”, “1″ from “l” and renders the tilde and hash characters in a way that I am confortable with.
The funny thing is, despite programming for years and investing heavily in IDEs and other development tools, I had never considered the impact of the font I used (Courier). I have realised that a decent font does make a huge difference – I’m now firmly in the “Courier is garbage” camp.
Thanks for opening my eyes.
Try the HVRaster (bitmap) and HVEdit (Truetype) high visibility fonts from http://www.procon.com.au/Fonts.htm.
Really clear numerals and punctuation chars for C++ and Java code. I also used to use Andale Mono and fixedsys but these high visibility fonts are unbeatable and come in 3 different widths.
Ed?
There are many cool programmer fonts. Just give a try to Montecarlo font (www.bok.net/MonteCarlo/). I think it’s almost perfect. I say “almost” because all of them failed to have a nice italic style.