The font of knowledge

wizzy — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 22:51:09 +0000

One of the nice things about the web and coding in general is the occasional little distraction thrown up in the space of toolsets, coding-practice and the like. Today those eddies in cyberspace have brought fonts to the fore, after a while in which I really hadn’t given it too much thought. But the fact is, for someone hacking code all day a good font, while maybe not as critical as a good editor (VIM btw), is important. In the same way as buying a good bed is important, you’ll have been staring at this font for a good few life years, when time comes to cash in your programming chips. So is worth some consideration.

I generally go for a good, reliable mono-space default which is less likely to go horribly wrong (VIM sometime gets confused with widths) and is cross-platform and easy. Andale Mono tends to do the job, without feeling particularly classy. Anyway, the Consolas font crops up a lot in various programming contexts, e.g. Slashdot, Reddit, Stackoverflow.

So my curiosity has finally been piqued and I’m going to give it a try. I certainly don’t have the balls to try a proportional font, even if readability is improved by 18% or so. Here is today’s Slashdot thread, that undoubtedly gets to the heart of the issue. And a nice post from Hive-Logic about the top ten programming fonts, which suggests I should give Inconsolata a go. Which I probably will. The accompanying Reddit thread, that undoubtedly gets to the heart of the issue.

I’ll buzz back with an opinion when I’ve had time to absorb the changes. Exciting times…

Oh, and for linux bods such as myself, here’s a little hack to get them into VIM.

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The font of knowledge