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.

Comments

Why, fonts designed just for that, of course!

[drix]

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.

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Re:Why, fonts designed just for that, of course!

[Brainchild]

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.

Wow. Just when you think something has fallen off into relative obscurity, it pops up in comments like the one above.

Unfortunately, Neep was a rather good first try. The last published version is over a year and a half old now, and suffers from several problems:

• The single quote (') and grave accent (`) characters have good, but wrong, intentions. They follow the old and misguided glyph forms ('9'-shaped right quote and backwards-'9'-shaped left quote) perpetuated by otherwise useful programs such as gcc and groff. At the time, i was following the lead of the then-prevalent 'fixed' family of fonts shipped with XFree86. I am sorry for the consequences of my ignorance.

• The fonts are designed for increasingly obsolete 75-dpi displays. When i recently (nine months ago is recently?) switched most of my X displays to default to 100 dpi (and my fontservers to 100 dpi fonts), i discovered that Neep doesn't provide 100 dpi variants. At 1280x1024 on a 17-inch monitor, -*-neep-medium-r-normal-*-*-120-75-75-*-*-iso8859- * is just too small. And i don't like -*-neep-medium-r-normal-*-*-140-75-75-*-*-iso8859- *, even in its unpublished, more legible form. I made that one because other folks wanted it. ;)

• Neep does not come in Unicode/ISO-10646 encoding. It was a mistake for me not to make Neep into a Unicode font to begin with. I apologize for the consequences of my ignorance.[*]

• Related to the above points: Neep is composed of beautiful, legible, hand-tuned bitmaps, and i just plain have kein Bock mehr to make more and bigger sizes, not to mention merging the existing, improved, but unpublished ISO8859-* fonts with Markus Kuhn's[*] UCS-encoded ones. I really wish i had learned how to create and hint TrueType or OpenType fonts instead of making bitmaps, so i could be lazy and simply make two or three fonts instead of fifty-some.

I myself have pretty much stopped using Neep and am using Lucida Console (10 pt, 100 dpi) instead[**] (though i still wish i could find actual bold, italic, and bold-italic variants so that i could use it with nedit).

Regardless, if you must get Neep, please get it from http://www.jmknoble.cx/fonts/ rather than the place that points to. Web pages move easily, but jmknoble.cx is likely to stick around for quite a while.

If someone is interested in maintaining jmk-x11-fonts further, using the improved, unpublished edition, feel free to contact me (address is listed at the bottom of this page). Note, though, that i'm liable to be slightly cranky, and i may not hand these over to just anyone; i'd prefer for the design goals and aesthetic sense to be preserved, since they do have my name on them....

[Sigh.] Success's sword has two edges. (And yes, Brainchild = Jim Knoble).

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[*] Markus Kuhn has converted the most recently (year-and-half-old) published version of Neep into Unicode fonts. I'm not sure whether he's published them or not; check here. I have them, though, and (as i mention above) am partway through the process of merging them with subsequent changes in the ISO-8859-* fonts. If enough folks ask (and it's okay with Markus), i suppose i could publish them if they're not available at his site.

[**] I've been through several iterations of "there must be something else out there that has what i want", and i continually come up with this:

• Andale Mono is nice, but it has too much leading (at least, after getting used to the Lucida type family) and its punctuation is too light.
• Lucida Sans Typewriter has the single-quote problem in XFree86-3.3.x, and it's neither TrueType nor UCS-encoded.
• Courier New has too much leading, is too light in normal weight and too heavy in bold weight, and is much too ugly in any weight.
• None of the other easily available monospace fonts look as good or legible to me as Lucida Console.

Oh well.

Black background web pages

[alisdair mcdiarmid]

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.

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.

Re:Black background web pages

[StandardDeviant]

Pick up any book on graphic design (by that I mean stuff like page layout). Any college of journalism will have at least one course on this (and by extension the college bookstore(s) will have the texts). My fiancee recently got her journalism degree (concentration in magazine design), so I've absorbed some of this stuff over her shoulder.

One book I got that does a pretty good job of explaining this stuff to amateurs is The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams (1994, Peachpit Press; $10.50 at www.bookpool.com). See specifically chapters 7 through 9 (the "Designing with type" section).

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Alternatively,

[JediTrainer]

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.