14 Responses for "Fonts for Programmers"

1. JC

   October 1st, 2004 at 17:48

   1

   I use Lucida Console, personally. Much easier to work with than any of the pseudo-typerwriter fonts, but still nicely monospaced

2. Lea

   October 1st, 2004 at 17:49

   2

   I used to use Lucida Console too, but Anonymous was just much nicer. :-)

3. Salamando

   October 1st, 2004 at 18:46

   3

   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.

4. Roshambo

   October 1st, 2004 at 18:57

   4

   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.

5. Lea

   October 1st, 2004 at 18:59

   5

   Thanks Roshambo. Fixed the link.

6. Chris

   October 2nd, 2004 at 00:19

   6

   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.

7. Dylan

   October 2nd, 2004 at 02:15

   7

   For some reason I can never get away from Fixedsys. I’ve tried and tried, but I’m hooked.

8. Charles Roper

   October 2nd, 2004 at 08:24

   8

   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.

9. Jonathan Hollin

   October 3rd, 2004 at 18:39

   9

   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.

10. Jonathan Hollin

    October 4th, 2004 at 21:38

    10

    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).

11. Jonathan Hollin

    October 4th, 2004 at 23:30

    11

    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.

12. Ed Ribachonek

    October 23rd, 2004 at 02:56

    12

    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.

13. Vic Klein

    October 19th, 2005 at 16:23

    13

    Ed?

14. DragonX

    September 4th, 2006 at 14:39

    14

    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.