I'm participating in Lambda School (look at my profile for posts of my thoughts) who "strongly recommends" using VSCode.
I've been using the VSCode default settings for years, but today as I was beginning a personal project, I got sidetracked to thinking: Would a good, readable, code font actually and truly be better than VSCode's default Consolas font?
So tell me, oh gurus of editor visuals...
What fonts do you use for coding?
(and color scheme, too, if you're feeling industrious).
Everyone's opinion counts... unless you're using daylight mode with a proportional font.
Top comments (7)
The most important thing for a coding font is that it has clear distinctions between these:
Q@O01lI|`'~"*#H+t.,:;daog8&5S$. Here is Cascadia Code:I used to use Anonymous/SourceCode Pro but I've fallen in love with those ligatures. Especially on iTerm2(mac) and Windows Terminal.
I like the dotted-0 in Cascadia, and that it's hinted for the screen, and has nice wide
()[]{}which make them easy to read. Also like that thegandahave simple descender/ascender, and are distinct fromo,&, and8.As for colours, I like "Shades of Purple" most, it's very well done. But also "Kimbie Dark" and the "Clear Dawn" variants, when I'm feeling nostalgic.
Fira code with those custom ligatures. And then whatever that dark mode in Xcode is.
Droid Sans Mono Dotted, specifically the version patched for Powerline. I like the clean design, easy readability, and good Unicode support (and prefer dotted 0 to slashed 0 because ø (which comes up for me some times in the console, but not really when coding)).
The color scheme is the standard Vim color scheme for dark backgrounds.
Monospaced font with programming ligatures
Fira Code: monospaced font with programming ligatures
Problem
Programmers use a lot of symbols, often encoded with several characters. For the human brain, sequences like
->,<=or:=are single logical tokens, even if they take two or three characters on the screen. Your eye spends a non-zero amount of energy to scan, parse and join multiple characters into a single logical one. Ideally, all programming languages should be designed with full-fledged Unicode symbols for operators, but that’s not the case yet.Solution
Download v.2 · How to install · Troubleshooting · News & updates
Fira Code is an extension of the Fira Mono font containing a set of ligatures for common programming multi-character combinations. This is just a font rendering feature: underlying code remains ASCII-compatible. This helps to read and understand code faster. For some frequent sequences like
..or//, ligatures allow us to correct…I use Operator Mono with Solarized dark theme.
I use the default Menlo font and whatever the pretty dark blue colored layout is
Inconsolata-dz (regular Inconsolata with straight quotes/apostrophes).