Coding Font Selection Tournament
Leo Laporte pointed me to the very clever site Coding Font, which lets you step through a tournament-style bracket of monospace fonts to find the one you like the best. Unfortunately it’s lacking a bunch of the options mentioned above, but if you’ve ever been curious about switching up your terminal font, it’s worth a go.
I highly recommend you disable showing the font names while you play, to avoid any bias toward fonts you already think you have an opinion about. But no matter how many times I play, I always get the same winner: Adobe’s Source Code Pro. My second favorite in this tournament is IBM Plex Mono. The most conspicuous omission: Intel One Mono.
This was fun, but it doesn’t have any of the Apple fonts. Currently, I’m using SF Mono in Xcode and Menlo in BBEdit, Tower, Mail, EagleFiler, and MarsEdit. I don’t think I’ll be changing, but I was surprised to find that, in the tournament at least, I liked Noto Sans Mono. It kind of reminds me of Monaco, but with more square serifs.
Previously:
- Use SF Mono Outside of Terminal and Xcode
- Menlo
- Top 10 Programming Fonts
- Clearing the Font Cache
- Fonts in iCab and Safari
- ProFont in Jaguar’s Terminal
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I also came up with Noto Sans Mono in my bracket.
But I'll be sticking with Monaspace Neon for my local dev work (it was also not in the bracket) https://monaspace.githubnext.com
My tournament winner was Incosolata, which was satisfying as that was a font of choice for me for awhile. Another recommendation not in the tournament, the font I've taken to recently for coding and terminals has been Iosevka. https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
One note that really affected the outcome of the game for me: make sure to adjust the font size and ligature on/off options to what you usually use in your editor.
@Steve Streza We must have similar taste in coding fonts, because I also got Inconsolata, and have been using Iosevka for a while now.
I like clear, crisp and condensed coding fonts, since with it being condensed I get more columns and can easily have two files open side by side on a 16x9 monitor with enough room left over for a sidebar.
I'll always have a special place in my heart though for Monaco, from back in my HyperCard days.
If you are not using Cascadia Code PL, we can't be friends, because you don't appreciate the amazing ligatures.
@Plume: Ligatures have no place in monospaced fonts because there's no risk of letter pairs like "ff", "fl", "fi" etc. overlapping each other in ugly ways. Instead, coding fonts use the ligature feature to make it so that your code listings lie to you about what operator characters are present, such as replacing "!=" with "≠". This is unhelpful and confusing IMHO.
I'm with Doodpants. I can't stand ligatures used like that. It's cute, but I never want a code editor to pretend that there's some other characters in my file than what's actually there.
"Ligatures have no place in monospaced fonts"
I'm sorry that you hate fun.
"your code listings lie to you"
Only if you're a moron.
