Slant community chat on DiscourseAs much as choice of a font is subjective there are important criteria to consider when choosing a programming font. The characters should be clear, easy to read, in cases of clashing ones such as 1, l, i or O, o, 0 easily distinguishable, differences between different kinds of brackets, quotes and parentheses should be clear, punctuation should be emphasized and they shouldn't break up words or sentences due to uneven character widths.
There are two ways fonts are drawn - as bitmaps or as vectors. Vector fonts allow more efficient scaling, but for screens with resolution below 720p it might be worth considering bitmap fonts as they are generally more legible at smaller sizes on low-resolution screens.
| 103 Recommended Products | Recommendations | Price | Price | Last Updated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 Inconsolata-g· · · | 151 | 22 | FREE | – | Aug 22, 2017 |
| #2 Menlo· · · | 87 | 14 | – | – | Jul 13, 2017 |
| #3 Source Code Pro· · · | 466 | 135 | – | – | Aug 23, 2017 |
| #4 Fira Code· · · | 74 | 7 | – | – | Aug 22, 2017 |
| #5 DejaVu Sans Mono· · · | 141 | 14 | Free | – | Aug 22, 2017 |
| #6 Monaco· · · | 151 | 29 | – | – | Aug 10, 2017 |
Pro Fixes clashing of similar characters
Inconsolata-g is a variant of the popular Inconsolata that fixes the similarity between "1" [one] and the "l" [lowercase ell].
Pro Free and open source
Inconsolata-g has been released under the Open Font License of SIL.
Pro Line height is a little larger than normal
This makes the lines feel less crowded which greatly helps readability.
Con Character widths are not consistent between regular and bold
Bold characters are not the same width as regular characters so the typeface is not consistently monospace.
Con () and {} are difficult to distinguish
The user may have difficulty distinguishing small size () and {} at a glance.
Con Renders lines as dashes in TUI interfaces
Lines in items like midnight commander, the treeview in htop, tmux panes, the tree command, et al., have ugly dashed lines instead of straight lines with sharp corners.
Pro Easy on user's eyes
Characters are very readable. They have consistent widths across all weights as to not break up words. Commonly used programming symbols such as various kinds of brackets are made easily discernible from each other and various punctuation marks are made bigger than normal. This makes them especial...
Pro Great readability
Equally well readable as Bitstream Vera/DejaVu Sans Mono, but with slashed zeros (aids with readability).
Con Seems too wide at size 16
The letters become quite wide at size 16, impacting upon readability.
Con Doesn't work at size 10
Menlo displays as expected for size 11 and bigger, but doesn't seem to work very well at size 10. Issues include zero not being the same height as the rest of the numbers and Parenthetical Brackets not matching up perfectly.
Pro Easy on user's eyes
The characters in Source Code Pro are easily readable. They have consistent widths across all weights as to not break up words. Commonly used programming symbols (such as various kinds of brackets) are made easily discernible from each other while various punctuation marks are made bigger than nor...
Pro Free and open source
The font is licensed under SIL open font license with source code available on GitHub. Being an open source font, it's also reasonable to expect incremental upgrades and additions to character sets and functionality.
Con Can be somewhat odd for hex numbers with certain styles
With certain font-size and font-weight combinations (12 pt and regular, for example) capital letters are bigger than integer digits, making hex numbers look weird.
Con Dotted zero lacks clarity
Dotted zero characters are less distinct from capital "O" characters than slashed zero characters.
Pro Has ligatures
This is particularly beneficial for those who wish to use combined letters such as "æ" and other diphthongs. But when it comes to programming, the ability to scan through your code is improved with ligatures for equality, arrow functions, and more.
Pro Supports retina displays
Fira Coda supports high pixel density retina displays.
Con Ligatures are nice-looking but harm clarity
Even though the font combines characters into ligatures, you still need to type the normal characters, and the ligatures make that difficult in many cases.
Con Needs support for ligatures
It can't work in plain terminal, must have built in support for ligatures in editor
Pro Very clear distinction between similar characters
It's easy to distinguish between characters such as I, 1, l, O, and 0 in DejaVu Sans Mono.
Pro Excellent unicode support
DejaVu Sans Mono has one of the most complete Unicode fonts available. This means you have access to a wide range of special symbols including mathematical symbols like arrows, operators, and special alphabets. This is useful for certain languages that require special characters like Agda. Some l...
Con The "-" symbol is short
For example, when using the '-' symbol for borders, it's super short in this font.
Con No ligatures
Missing programming ligatures.
Pro Easy on user's eyes
Monaco's rendering is similar to that of Consolas but slightly more playful. Each character seems to be a tiny bit larger when compared to Consolas, yet code takes up the same amount of space.
Pro Good differentiation between clashing characters
The curly braces are easily distinguishable from parentheses, "0" is distinguishable from "O", and "1" is distinguishable from "l", to name but a few.
Con Only comes with Mac OS X
While it generally only comes with OS X, you can try here for installing on other platforms.
Con Ability to select different anti-aliasing grades was dropped
Before OS X Snow Leopard, it was possible to apply varying degrees of anti-aliasing to the font. At present, the previously "medium" anti-aliasing option is the only choice.
Pro Excellent readability
Line thickness, shape, and spacing help you to recognize characters and words correctly the first time through, without your eyes having to skip back and re-read.
Pro Easily distinguishable characters
There are dotted zeros in Ubuntu Mono so to distinguish from the letter "O", while the lowercase letter "l" is very different from the number "1".
Con Many characters seem imbalanced
Some of the characters don't feel like they match well which can be distracting.
Con Lowercase "m" is weird and stands out
The lowercase "m" in Ubuntu Mono really stands out because of its unusual shape, which disrupts the user's attention when reading.
Pro Highly configurable
Input can be configured online with preview: width, weight, line height, and alternate letterforms.
Pro Available in Mono, Sans, and Serif
There are a couple advantages to using a proportionally spaced font in code: comfort of reading, ease of spotting typos, and better differentiation between different kinds of code with font styles. Fontbureau dedicated an entire page to this topic. Unfortunately, a lot of text editors only support...
Con Closed source
Although font designers need to make money too, open source model is preferred.
Con Hard to distinguish "8" from "B" at low sizes
This often impacts upon designers working with hexadecimal numbers. Many fonts address this by either changing the x-height for numerals, making "8" more of an hourglass shape, or making the "B" cap smaller. At 10 pt, there's less than three pixels of a difference (anti-ali...
Pro Can display a lot of text due to narrow width
Consolas is really narrow compared to most monospace fonts. The more narrow each symbol, the more text you see on the line.
Pro Nice appearance
Consolas has a good appearance and character without being too distracting.
Con Font size can't be changed gradually
Letter height is the same for 9 and 10, and for 11 and 12 pt. When switching from 10 to 11 pt, letter height changes abruptly (whereas line height changes gradually). This makes it impossible to choose exact letter height on a standard display. Size can't be set to 10.5 pt, for example.
Con Not free
Consolas costs 129€ for personal use, but you can get it for free (as in beer) bundled with some free MS products (example).
Pro Clashing characters are clearly distinguishable
Characters that could be mistaken for one another (O, 0, I, l, 1, etc.) have distinct shapes to make them easier to tell apart in the context of source code.
Con Small punctuation makes readability difficult
In some programs it's hard to see punctuation marks, especially periods and colons.
Con Hard to distinguish [ and {
Braces [] and {} are very similar.
Pro Compact line height
Just like Courier New (the metrics of which this font emulates), its line height isn't too big, which results in more lines on the screen, compared to Consolas and several other more popular fonts.
Pro Very readable
Liberation Mono works well with hinting on high-resolution displays.
Con Difference between "0" and "O" isn't clear
It can be difficult to tell the difference between the number "0" and the letter "O". However, the Fedora Project has a slightly altered version of Liberation Mono that fixes this with a dotted zero.
Pro Narrow width saves a lot of space
The compact design of the fonts allows for effective editing in 2-3 windows side-by-side, even on a laptop screen.
Pro Very clear and legible
The font has been hand-hinted with legibility in mind.
Con Can be expensive
The cost for the bold font is $20 and this can get as high as $225 for the full package.
Con "Bold" is more like heavy/black rather than bold
If you use bold to highlight keywords, you may find that bold version of the font is too bold and disrupts the flow of the text. Bold is heavily used by many IDEs, so you may need to adjust code highlighting settings and use other means of highlighting keywords, or maybe choosing a different color...
Pro Clashing characters are easily distinguishable
This font offers very distinct programming characters that help differentiate the following clashing pairs: {} vs. (), "0" vs. "O", and "1" vs. "l".
Pro Fills out the space well
Envy Code R also fits more into a given width when compared to Source Code Pro.
Con No Cyrillic glyphs
There are no Cyrillic glyphs in Envy Code R which may be an issue for Russian users.
Con Lowercase "w" is distracting
The lowercase "w" is a bit distinct looking due to the narrow nature of the font. This could cause a distraction to some users.
Pro Great line spacing and very easy on user's eyes
The line spacing in Meslo LG makes it very powerful and gives it an amazing look. The font is especially clear for reading code in Eclipse or Intelli J.
Pro Patched Powerline version exists
A patched version for Vim Powerline is easily downloadable and comes with additional glyphs.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
Pro Libre webfonts are available in svg, eot, ttf, woff, and woff2 formats
Hack is free for unlimited commercial and non-commercial use. The webfonts are hinted (TrueType instruction set) to optimize display on the screen and are built into all commonly used web font formats with each new release. They include the complete release character set and smaller (filesize) b...
Pro Based on the tried and tested Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
The fonts are in the Vera Sans Mono lineage with a significant expansion of the character set (which includes Cyrillic and modern Greek character sets), new glyph shapes and modifications of the original glyph shapes, as well as improvements in metrics and hinting/TT instructions to make it more l...
Con Sometimes difficult to distinguish lowercase "i" and lowercase "l"
When using a higher resolution monitor and a smaller font size, the lowercase "i" and lowercase "l" are very difficult to distinguish. The space between the dot and the remainder of the letter seems to somehow disappear, thereby making it look like a solid line, similar to the...
Pro Looks great even without anti-aliasing
Many fonts look terrible without anti-aliasing. Not Terminus, it looks clear and crisp.
Con Italics are not very appealing
Italicized Terminus TTF doesn't appear as aesthetically pleasing as it was intended.
Pro Clear characters
PT Mono uses slashed zeros and a rounded lowercase "L", while all numbers are easily distinguishable.
Pro Crisp on display
No pixelation on high pixel density displays.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
Pro Looks neat
Droid Sans Mono looks beautiful. The only disadvantage is that there's no italics or bold.
Pro Makes code very easy to read, especially if using the version where zeroes are slashed
Feels very easy to read code, even in a very small px (like 10 or 9). Letters are slightly separated, l (ell) and 1 are different, " (opening and closing quote) is straight and not angled, and the "Zero Slashed" version makes it an excellent font for coding.
Con Zero is not slashed or dotted
This can make it hard to distinguish the letter "O" from the number "0".
Pro High legibility
M+ M Type-1 (1M) was created to emphasize the balance of natural letterform and high legibility.
Pro 17 different character-encodings available
ISO-8859-1, Latin-1 Western European ISO-8859-2, Latin-2 Central European ISO-8859-3, Latin-3 South European ISO-8859-4, Latin-4 North European ISO-8859-5, Latin/Cyrillic ISO-8859-7, Latin/Greek ISO-8859-8, Latin/Hebrew ISO-8859-9, Latin-5 Turkish ISO-8859-10, Latin...
Con Certain pseudo-graphic characters take two spaces
In this font, some pseudo-graphic characters can take up two spaces instead of one.
Pro Extremely readable
You can look at the code for hours and hours. The height between lines and the spacing is perfect.
Pro Looks great and is easy on eyes
Almost looks like Source Code pro and works great with Intelli J where Source Code Pro renders all junk on one of the primary IDE. Very good for people who read code through out the day.
Con Large line height
Compared to other options, Fira has a high line height, which reduces the number of lines you can see on screen at one time.
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