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106 comments
  • I love ligatures and Fira Code (retina) is the best and absolutely comfortable for me.

  • I'm too old to die on any hills these days but mainly if it:

    • is mono spaced
    • doesn't change characters to something other than what they literally are

    Then I'm happy

  • Fira Code was my font of choice for a while, but now I use JetBrains Mono! Cascadia Code is also acceptable.

  • I was using Inconsolata for about 5 years, then switched to Inconsolata-g when that came out, for another 5 years. But it's a pretty old font and is TrueType and it's hinting is bad, so doesn't render well on Linux and it misses out on a lot of new font features.

    In 2019 I went hunting for a new favourite font, and tried out a whole bunch, giving each one a week in my IDE to really get to know it. During that time I realised I had a bunch of basic requirements for a font that some do better than others:

    • Similar characters should be distinct: eg, uppercase O and number 0. Uppercase I, lowercase l, and number 1. It's weird how many popular coding fonts fail to make these clear.
    • Not too wide, and not too narrow. You'd think monospace fonts are all around the same size horizontally, but a standard 80-column slab of code can vary greatly in screen space width depending on the font, some are much too wide. Consolas is an example that is too wide. I like to have the option to tile three code panes side-by-side on a 1080P screen.
    • Easy to read. For some reason a lot of coding-specific fonts affect my ability to quickly and easily read the code, and some give me a headache.

    I realised that my use of Inconsolata for such a long time in the early stages of my career definitely shaped my preferences. I was looking for something similar to Inconsolata. That was when I discovered Fantasque Sans Mono. It's a kind of weird looking font, maybe a bit too playful for a serious coding font, but I found I could read and parse code much faster (maybe it helps with mild dyslexia?), each letter is very distinct from every other. It has elements of handwriting, it has elements of a dyslexic font, it has similarities to Inconsolata.

    I've been using Fantasque (with Nerdfonts mixins) for 4 years now. Since then there has been a renaissance of code fonts, like Jet Brains Mono, and Fira Code. I like those, they are good fonts, but I keep going back to Fantasque, it feels so comfortable to use.

  • I use SauceCode Pro (variant of SourceCode Pro with nerdfonts stuff). I've given up on changing it because everytime I do I find stuff that's "non-standard" in the fonts I test and it bugs the hell out of me. @ signs are the absolute worst offenders, which is weird because they have a very uniform look everywhere that's not a specialized "programming" monospace font.

  • I have a custom TrueType font embedding the UCS bitmap fonts so I can use it with modern font renderers which dropped support for those old font formats.

106 comments