Programming Fonts

Question

What's your preferred programming font?

There's an existing question like this. However, there are over 100 answers, most of which are just, "+1 MyFontOfChoice, blah, blah, blah". No offense to others involved in that post, but I was hoping we could get a more organized set of responses.

Rules

• ONE post per font. If there is already a post for the font of your choice, upvote it.
• Start new posts by listing the font name on the first line in bold.
• Link the font name to a download if one is available.
• List relevant details concisely.
• Don't list superfluous details. For example, we'll assume the font is free unless stated otherwise, we'll assume the font is monospaced unless stated otherwise, etc.
• If you have a good image of the font, preferably with standard text ("The quick brown fox...", "abc...123..."), put it after the details.
• Save any personal comments ("I love using X font with editor Y") for the very end of the post or better yet, just append them as a separate comment.

Example

Consolas

Must use ClearType or it looks terrible.

Answer 1

Consolas

Must use ClearType or it looks terrible.

Answer 2

Fixedsys

Windows
16 px

Answer 3

Andale Mono

Answer 4

Comic Sans

Answer 5

I'd recommend taking a look at the Programming Fonts post on Coding Horror. It has plenty of recommendations with screenshots too.

Answer 6

Courier New

And a big high-resolution monitor.

Answer 7

Monaco

OS X
Wikipedia article

Answer 8

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono

Answer 9

Proggy Clean

Proggy fonts are available in Bitmap, TrueType, PCF, and Mac formats.

Answer 10

Lucida Console

Answer 11

Lucida Sans Typewriter

$75 for four fonts (regular, bold, italic, bold-italic), or $20 for just one.

Was included for free with some Microsoft products.

Answer 12

Envy Code R

By Damien Guard.

Answer 13

Droid Sans Mono

!

Answer 14

Panic Sans

Included in the wonderful for other-reasons-too, Coda.

Answer 15

10pt Courier New with no antialiasing or anything

Answer 16

Dina

Proggy derivative

Answer 17

Verdana

Variable-width
Easy to read at small sizes

Answer 18

Pragmata

Costs 90 euros.
9pt is ideal.

Answer 19

I prefer syntax highlighting that supports multiple fonts in multiple sizes. Editors like Source Insight and even Notepad++ allow you to customize syntax highlighting not only by text color, but also by the font family and font size.

You can do things like make class declarations and member declarations a larger font size to stand-out a little and make comments a different font family to blend into the background and look less like code.

EDIT: Adding picture. Note how varying the font faces and font sizes make comments, function names, literals, etc. stand out from one another even more than just differentiating by color does. Sadly, Stack Overflow has resized my screenshot, but I think it looks quite nice at full resolution on a big monitor.

Answer 20

Proggy Tiny

Answer 21

ProFont

Answer 22

DejaVu Sans Mono

Answer 23

Inconsolata

Answer 24

I'm old. I like my fonts monospaced and big, My default gnometerm uses monospace 16. Subtleties of antialiasing and what not are lost on me.

I generally use the maximize button and make the terminal window fill the whole screen, have several of these going at once, of different background colors (I rigged a taskbar icon to start gnome terms with a different color each time it's clicked) and use alt-tab to switch between these, which works pretty well.

In my younger days, I'd often set up four windows taking up a quarter of the screen each, but my eyes these days prefer one big window covering the whole screen.

Getting old sucks. At least the tools accommodate this particular weakness.

Answer 25

6x13

It's a bitmap font available only on X-Windows, but similar to 9pt Monaco bitmap from the Macs of yore.

Answer 26

Syntax (Oberon version) was a font I really loved when I used to program in Oberon on DEC and later Ceres-3 workstations, but then Oberon's an oddity as source was written in a rich-text editing environment with proportional fonts.

The Syntax bitmap that came with Oberon had italics with far more flair than the official outline font version from Linotype.

Answer 27

Liberation Mono

Answer 28

Anonymous Pro

Answer 29

I take back my comment on 10pt Courier as I have fully switched over to 10pt Consolas.

So much easier to use/read :)

Answer 30

Montecarlo

A variant of the crystal clear ProFont but with more balanced looking 'A's and a dedicated boldface.

Answer 31

Akkurat Mono

180 Swiss francs (almost $170!)

Answer 32

For VS developers you can reference the following themes, some of them are very pretty.Visual Studio Programmer Themes Gallery

Answer 33

Share TechMono

Answer 34

MS Gothic

Standard Windows font for Japanese. Immune to ClearType, so crisp rendering is guaranteed.

Main disadvantage is that, because it's a Japanese font, a backslash will be rendered as ¥. Once you get used to it, however, it's not really a problem - at least not if you don't actually NEED the ¥ sign, since it might be a bit confusing if you do.

Answer 35

Mensch

Answer 36

Triskweline

Answer 37

Crystal

Answer 38

Onuava

Answer 39

Adaptive Code

costs $20

Answer 40

Arial Monospaced

costs $20

Answer 41

Luxi Mono

I have a weird liking for serifed monospace, and I find Courier unattractive. The letterforms in Luxi are reminiscent of old DOS text-mode. No slash or dot on the zero, unfortunately.