Archive for Consolas tag
Italic syntax highlighting in Visual Studio 2005
I came across a posting by Thomas Restrepo about a theme for Vim he likes called Wombat and how it wouldn’t be worth porting to Visual Studio as it doesn’t support italic syntax highlighting – as we all know.
This got me thinking and I was able to port it with italics although the process is a bit of a hack.
If I can figure out a way of making this hack re-distributable without infringing on copyrights I’ll follow this one up.
In the meantime here’s a screen-shot of it in action using Consolas.
I can’t stand using vim for .NET – I’ve got better things to do than commit the entire .NET Framework to memory. I remember watching a WPF screen-cast where the guy was using “his trusty editor” (vim or emacs – I forget ;-) and going on about the great keyboard short-cuts whilst constantly trying different method names, compiling yet again and finally looking up help in the absence of IntelliSense.
I did however check out the latest trunk of SharpDevelop this weekend and was quite impressed with both the product and the source code. There was a bit of flickering with the solution explorer and the icons seem to be a bit of a steal-and-mash but otherwise looks first class.
[)amien
Preview of Envy Code R programming font
Envy Code R has been updated since this post.
My last post got me thinking – if I’m so happy with Envy Code B bar it’s ability to scale or take advantage of ClearType then there is only one real option. I reached for the pixelated TrueType conversion of Envy Code B and five hours later had a rough version of my first ever vector font – Envy Code R.
It’s unlikely I’ll be able to work on this before I get back from Japan so it will have to wait but here’s a sneak preview of it stacking up against Envy Code B and the current cool kid on the block Consolas.
The new font will try and be as much like Envy Code B at point size 10 whilst taking advantage of ClearType and hinting where possible. There is still a lot of work to do on the unusual symbols, foreign characters and increasing the curve emphasis whilst not destroying the scaled letterform versions.
Here’s a preview inside Visual Studio 2005:
I promise that’s all the font posts for a little while…
[)amien
Comparing programming fonts
The blogging about favourite programming fonts doesn’t seem to want to truly die down so here’s how I rate the most popular fonts for programming in descending order with my own Envy Code B which I use all the time – but now desperately needs the ClearType treatment.
If you click the image you’ll see red boxes highlighting what I feel are the various problem characters/positioning with each font.
Comments are welcome apart from people suggesting proportional fonts. Tried Tahoma, Verdana and a few others – I just plain don’t like proportional fonts for programming.
It seems many people are raving over Consolas but the x-y proportion just seems wrong to me – I prefer taller thinner characters for the odd longer line. Don’t get me started on the ugly lower-case g and ? or the fact that numbers are smaller than capital letters.
[)amien