Hivelogic’s Top 10 Programming Fonts

Dan Benjamin lists his Top 10 Programming Fonts:

In the past, we’ve had to decide between tiny monospace fonts or jagged edges. But today, modern operating systems do a great job of anti-aliasing, making monospace fonts look great at any size.

Here’s a round-up of the top 10 readily-available monospace fonts for your coding enjoyment, with descriptions, visual examples and samples, and download links for each.

A few years ago when I switched from BBEdit to TextMate I spent a good deal of time trying to find the right combination of theme, font and font size. I ended up pretty heavily tweaking an existing dark theme (Twilight) along with Monaco at 12-points with anti-aliasing. When Panic released Coda with a custom derivative of Bitstream Vera Sans Mono called Panic Sans, I ended up switching to Panic Sans. It’s just simply, subtly better. When you’re staring at something for hours at a time, you tend to notice the little elegant subtleties like crisper punctuation and cleaner character glyphs.

So now I’m trying out Inconsolata per Dan’s advice. A couple of initial observations versus Panic Sans:

It’s much smaller at the same point sizes so I had to bump up the font size 2-points in order to get it around the size I’m used to.
The glyphs have a tiny bit more flair to them… take a look at the lowercase “g” and “l” in Dan’s screenshots.
So far, my only niggle is that this font wasn’t meant to be used without anti-aliasing. For some reason I just can’t bring myself to use an anti-aliased font in the terminal.