Comments on: Comparing programming fonts

By: Damien Guard

Damien Guard — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 22:50:25 +0000

The ratio is one of a personal preference I guess but square letters like those in Consolas have never appealed to me.

The Euro sign was improved in the ClearType replacement for Envy Code B which is imaginatively named Envy Code R that you could check out.

[)amien

By: jxp

jxp — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 19:24:47 +0000

I find Envy Code too slim/tall and the Euro sign is just awful.
I really prefer Consolas. You don’t seem to like the g, but it is very good at small sizes, because it can’t be confused with the q.
Wonderful blog. All the best.

By: Damien Guard

Damien Guard — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 11:11:22 +0000

Somebody called Nick Gravgaard came up with a technique known as Elastic Tabs which would seem to solve the issue but until they turn up in Visual Studio they're no good to me ;-)

[)amien

By: Rod

Rod — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 10:16:12 +0000

I program in C and Assembler and both these languages really need mono-spaced fonts because I look at and think about code in blocks, not single statements. That includes comments off to the right.

Like everybody else, I need to have patterns to make sense of the world, and of code. I've been coding for 22 years and never once have I wished for anything other than an easy to read mono-spaced font. Those who go on about using proportional fonts probably don't actually write a lot of code. And no doubt they secretly wish that just sometimes the code would line up nicely in columns - however, they swear by their sentenced code that reads like a book which code is *not* and never can be.

But what if a compiler could read Word documents? Then I could set tabs and have my proportional font too! Still, there will be situations when easy this won't look right on the screen. The text editor that Parallax have created for their Propeller uC IDE does have a special editing mode that may allow use of proportional fonts. But I haven't personally checked this out.

And the argument rages on.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 11:33:42 +0000

My Visual Studio colors

By: Damien Guard

Damien Guard — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 22:01:28 +0000

Courier for me is no good - the serifs at that point size are distracting.

That reminds me, I need to try that keyboard you brought ;-)

[)amien

By: steve

steve — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 21:35:40 +0000

Guess I’m just used to recognising my patterns in Courier by now, I find other fonts distracting. Plus I don’t like ClearType – never got into the whole soft-focus look, gimme pure saturated pixels any day.

I do agree on proportional fonts being pure insanity for coding thoug.

By: Tomas Restrepo

Tomas Restrepo — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 10:55:30 +0000

Pretty Cool, Damien; thanks for showing the complete comparison. it would be interesting to see it in larger sizes, though, to see the differences more clearly.

Well, that, and the fact that it was Scott Hanselman that got me used to working with big fonts (lots of less headaches now). Besides, a 10pt font at 1920×1200 is not very readable at all :)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 09:55:23 +0000

Short: My Visual Studio Color Settings

By: Damien Guard

Damien Guard — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 08:04:56 +0000

For me I find the right font makes a world of difference.

It becomes easier to scan the text and recognise distinct patterns and I find programming more of pleasure.

Much like having a good keyboard.

[)amien

By: steve

steve — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 19:38:59 +0000

Am I the only person who doesn’t care about this enough to change the default? Maybe it’s because I don’t use ClearType, the zeroes in particular are much different when using that.