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What Font Do You Use For Coding?
Roger Ramjet asks: "As an old schooler, I was somewhat hooked on VT100 terminals and coding with VI; however I never seem to be happy with fonts in DevStudio (amongst others). My question is, what fonts do you prefer to program with, and why?" As another "old schooler", I must say I do prefer monospaced fonts in a nice sans-serif for coding.
(Accept no substitute!) I have to create a font alias for it to be available for KDE apps. Under Windows there is really only one alternative: Lucida Console. I hate Courier.
My color scheme is light gray (#C0C0C0) on a dark color (#100820). White-on-black is just as bad for the eyes as pure black-on-pure white.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
I find that in white on black; it's readable down to 10 pixel size on a 1840x1380 21" monitor. 12 pixels is comfortable and makes for 260x104 characters on screen. Yummy...
Around the same time, I re-wrote my emacs color scheme with a dark grey background and off-white/gray/brownish/mostly neutral text colors. It might sound a little disgusting at first, but I have found it to be a really good scheme for coding in both light and dark rooms. You can copy it from here if you want to take a look. The only "bad" thing that people might complain about is that my highlight region is black with a yellow background (I don't highlight often, but it clearly shows where things are highlighted).
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
ouch. I hurt just thinking about that setup.
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I post links to stuff here
I have Lucida Typewriter installed as TT on this winbox. Can't say that I ever use it, mostly because it's not hinted, so it scales down below 12pts really poorly.
Can't say where I got it, unfortunately. (It could been from a momentary installation of Lotus WordPro a couple years ago.) However, it looks verrry similar to the Lucida Console font which is part of the standard Windows install, and is hinted.
To answer the Ask Slashdot: MS's Anadale Mono is the only way to go for monospaced text. It even has a dotted 0 (zero), and a clear distinction between l and 1.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I find that black 9pt Verdana on snow in XEmacs is excellent... lots of text on screen at once. Also, it's spookily similar to the look of CodeWarrior on the Mac...
I use, in X speak, -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c -60-iso8859-1 which is aliased in XFree86 as just plain "fixed." It's a clean monospaced font that's easy to read at 1024x768.
You could always try Eterm, my emulator of choice. Has a lot more visual options.
- Milo Hyson
The only font I'll use now in my Eterms (and in gvim) is lucida typewriter, specificially:
-*-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-*-*-*-120-75-75-*-*-* -*
or (for smaller resolutions/screens):
-*-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-*-*-*-100-75-75-*-*-* -*
Since I realised it was possible, I also use it as my monospaced font in my browser: makes reading code much easier.
It's a nice, simple, sans-serif monospaced font, with all the useful symbols. Comes with X11R6: is there a TrueType version? I'd love to use it in Windows at university.
I made my own 5x9 font, because Lucida Console didn't look good enough at 7 pt. (on my Windows box @ work)
I still need to convert the bitmap graphics over to a True Type font. Anyone have any tools to recommend?
My favorite color scheme has always been the old DOS WordPerfect one: white characters on a dark blue background... perhaps the only thing I like about NT4 is its nostalgic startup screen in the same colors. I read somewhere once that some study had determined this to be the best color combination for your eyes...
...now that I ponder it, a low-frequency color like blue for the background is easy on your eyes; the white characters contrast really well for visibility.
The only problem with this is that it falls apart with syntax highlighting-- the reason I use grey-on-black in all my XTerms... but every so often I switch back to -syntax +blue.
I also like green-on-black...
-- You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
found it in sumex mac repository in both type-1 and truetype - it was modeled by typo freaks to match the IBM Selectric type ball... which looks like an egg. Their notes say that they hated Adobe's Letter Gothic because it wasn't monotype... this one is.
I use one called "Terminal", nice VT100 type.
zork% mv *.asp
283 files eaten by a grue
In my Mac IDE I use the following settings: font color: black, background color: white with yellow tint (r255 g252 b250) font face: Courier 10pt.
It looks nice and doesnt hurt my eyes at 1024x768.
At the same time I have PuTTY sessions to a number of Solaris boxen. In each session I use Andale mono with font-smoothing enabled. Andale Mono, even at low point sizes, works flawlessly with the most confusing characters, and is easier on the eye than the various Courier and Lucida Sans options.
Courier font, size 11. Nothing beats a "typewriter" font!!
Proportional fonts rock for coding!Y ate.htm
Sure, they take a little getting used to, but they make variable recognition heaps faster, and with good syntax styling+cut/paste, the whole typo issue just vanishes... Here's my editor here:
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Arcade/1783/
(Looks best at 1600x1200)
-ShunScene
Thank you very much. That sounds like exactly what I wanted to read.
Bringing irony to the Slash-masses
It's not that I don't believe you, rather that I would like to read/find out more information about it.
I remember an article that I read a few years ago that disscussed the advantages/disadvantages of serif Vs. san-serif fonts and it was very interesting. I would like to read more about this.
Bringing irony to the Slash-masses
You probably already know about this one, but this is just in case you don't. I used to love using BBEdit on my mac as well. When I switched to Linux i found the keystroke combinations in Xemacs to be better than BBEdit's, although the GUI menus are not situated as nicely. Xemacs has a nice demo that you can run that teaches you many of the keystroke combinations.
Bringing irony to the Slash-masses
Some nice fonts for coding and other fixed pitch applications: Monospaced Fonts for the Screen are here. Since I use Windows at work, I grabbed MS's Andale Mono for the web here. It's a nice font for coding (at least to me) and doesn't require any license payments.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Being stuck a lot with minimal Windoze tools (multiple interpretations possible), I tend to use 10 point Courier New TrueType. It's mono, clean, the characters are well-formed, and I can fit a fair amount on a moderate screen. I also like it for printouts.
For Windoze black/color on a white background, it's the best I've found.
Of course, my "environment" merits the modding down of this comment to -something_big.
Re earlier comments, all that white background tires me out, too. Even if you don't consciously perceive the screen refreshes, they strain your vision and so the brain that's processing the vision.
I seem to recall reading that studies show TV, regardless of content, heightens agitation, aggression, etc. Possible link with the flicker -- worse with TV due to interlacing and lower refresh rates.
I would think the effect, if real, is present with CRTs as well. Light text on a dark/black would seem a good choice to lessen the extremity of the flicker's visibility and so its effect.
Trust me, this is both easier on the eyes and easier to read than any other combo I have found.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
So how do I get my xterms to have a black background and white foreground? I'm used to Putty windows with nice coloring but now that I have an X server, I'm baffled. For now, I have to start up xterms from the command line of another xterm to get sane colors that don't burn my retinas.
but there must be some default file I can set somewhere. The 100pp of documentation don't ever clearly say "you can put this text in that file and it will work." But I've tried putting
in .Xdefaults-localhost and that doesn't do
a thing.
I'd like to get rid of overstrike bolding, too. Man is that ever a bad idea.
my favotire thing about X is that now it's reasonable to have two xterms side by side at 1024x768. I complain about regular size X fonts all the time, but the small fonts beat Windoze Courier New and Terminal easily. The sizes are set right and the fonts are readable.
Brian
Another mono-spaced font. It is a serif font, just, the serifs are pretty minor and that makes it much more readable at small point sizes :-) It's made by M$ themselves I think, but I get it from softseek (preview available).
Lucida Console is an agreeable font in Win32... very readable even at obnoxiously small point sizes, like 8pt. Plus, the number 1 and the letter L are quite distinct from one another. Hot-diggety!
HOT PASTRAMI!
No matter what the platform, I use the standard 8x8 monospaced system font with all vertical lines at least 2 pixels wide.
Next, I bring the screen resolution down to the point where individual pixels are easily visible, and I set the background to a dark-to-medium blue or purple and use all brightly colored text. If syntax highlighting is available, keywords and symbols are white, numbers are green, comments are purple, and the rest is yellow.
For me, this makes it really easy to scan through code and stay in context.
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My opinions are mine.
When working in windoes I use the old standby - Fixedsys - The font is bold enough to be read
Charlie
(also an old school programmer)
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Dark Blue background
Text = Yellow
Keyword = White
Comment = Green
Number = Purple
String = Cyan
Operator = White
Does anyone know how to change the "standard" colors in Dev Studio? That magenta is next to useless, I would love to assign an arbitray color to it.
Lucida console
But I did just download neep, and it might be nice for a change.
I was using andale mono for a while - Microsoft's Truetype contribution to fixed width fonts.
My alltime favorite was dec terminal, but it is only available in 14 pt, which is not suitable on all the machines on which I code. But it reminds me of ForTran days hacking on VT terminals. Light green chars on a black background, using EDT.
All my current coding is black background, syntax highlighting on. Using JED with custom colors for highlighting.
I usually code in 14 to 16 point font. I find that at this level most of the "standard" fonts are usable (i.e. something in the courer-TNR-arial-whatever family). I usually end up using a TrueType version of courier if it's available.
I also go out of my way to get a) syntax highlighting (becuase no matter how good I get at C I always forget that fscking terminating */ ;-) ) and b) a dark back ground color scheme (this way the lighter colors in a syntax schema show up better).
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
If you've spent any reasonable amount of time coding with standard fonts you've probably come to notice that standard fonts suck for coding :) { looks almost identical to ( (in monospace), ditto O and 0, : and ;, etc. A guy named Jim Knoble puts out a set of fonts called "Neep" that are designed specifically to address these issues. You can get them here. I switched over to these using a high-contrast color scheme in Emacs a few months ago and my eyes love me for it. If you are having problems with squinting/eye strain you should give these a shot.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
The reason for this is the serifed fonts these pages use: the serifs are very useful for guiding the eye between letters in long lines of text when the text is dark and the background is light. In inverse colour, they actually make it hard to make out the shape of the letters, so a sans-serifed font is advisable.
what colour schemes? When coding, I found it to be less a problem about specific fonts than I did about the brightness of what I was looking at.
A black shell (heck - even DOS) with white characters has always been easier on my eyes than a bright GUI interface (like the Windows default) with black characters. I'm unsure why, because I have a hell of a time reading the black-background web pages out there like Segfault or Planetquake to name a couple, but for some reason the old 80x25 black and white has always been easy on my eyes. Funny thing about the web sites, though - I have the problem on IE much more than on Netscape, but it's still there on both browsers. I end up highlighting all the text on the page just so I can read it.
If you're sticking with the windowed environments with more font choices, I'd have to say that I've always liked to work with Arial Black. It's not as harsh to focus on like the Courier or Times New Roman fonts that seem to be default just about everywhere. The characters are thicker and nicely rounded, and look good to me in many different resolutions.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.