If you want a more educational overview than this list which is kind of poor for discoverability (not to mention some egregious oversights), Slant has an awesome topic and there are lots of type samples. http://www.slant.co/topics/67/~what-are-the-best-programming...
Voting is about choosing the "least worse" candidate, not the best one for the job. Choosing nothing is not a choice. But choosing between 2 parties is not a choice either.
I really can't stand any of the fonts I've found and tried. Every single one of them has an offensive appearance.
The only font I can find that is both consistently readable at small sizes and doesn't drive me stark raving mad with Lovecraftian shapes is Inconsolata-g. And I hate Inconsolata-g.
Consolas is simply offensive, and Proggy has got to be the ugliest thing I have seen in my life.
Clean is moderately tolerable (and marginally better than Inconsolata-g on most entities) despite being Lovecraftian, but it has so many broken characters and interferes so badly with my graphics driver (terminals on Linux under some versions of the `nvidia` driver behave very badly when using a bitmap font), that I can't use it.
I'm still looking for a font that doesn't make me want to raze several small towns.
I used Consolas a lot, but eventually switched to fixed. Fixed just lets me pack a lot more text on my screen, which is very important for my functions.
Consolas has too much of a Microsoft flavor for my tastes. That, and I find its less angular competitor Inconsolata to be much cleaner and more elegant.
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is the only smooth font I've been able to find that still looks good at smaller sizes, which means more lines of code on the screen. Combined with Solarized (usually light), my eyes have been really really spoiled.
I used this for a while, but found it packed a little too tight horizontally. With widescreen monitors and languages where keeping to 80 columns is still standard, I found it was wasting too much space. There's only so much code I want on my screen at any one time before it's more overwhelming than actually useful.
I use it and typically have my font size set fairly large. One advantage of this is that it encourages short code blocks.
Then, if I'm dealing with code that is massively indented, like HTML, or JS with deeply nested callbacks, I can shrink down to a normal font size and still be able to read while also being able to see everything.
Dina, by far the best programming font ever, highly lisible even at 8pt, ever char is different, vertical alignement is taken using prog languages into mind, it has it all
Thank you for this. I think this variant might tear me away from my long-time favorite, Inconsolata. It seems very close, yet even more readable. I love it.
I have (and I just did again). Maybe I should give it more time to warm up to it?
If I can't get a slashed zero deja vu sans mono, I will just have to buy a hi-res screen so the zero dot is less ugly (should do anyway).
So, before submitting, I found a slashed version (saved) and I am now happy! I forget source, but can email to people who want.
I do agree. The aspect ratio is perfect, and it's very readable for its size.
I've used the same version of 6x13 on Windows (http://www.hassings.dk/lars/fonts.html) since forever, pretty much, and before that I used some other version of 6x13. Today, 15 years since I first set eyes on it, it's still my console font and my emacs font.
Unfortunately, modern versions of Visual Studio don't support bitmap fonts, so for that I've had to change to 9 point MS Gothic. This has one unusual feature ('\' appears as a yen symbol, since it's a Japanese font), and the descenders are rather short (presumably Japanese readers are differently sensitive to this stuff), but it's tall like 6x13, pixel-perfect at 9 point size, and perfectly serviceable for programming work.
(There's also a serif equivalent, MS Mincho, which is usable but a bit fussy for my taste. 8 point Gungsuh Che and Gulim Che are also workable, but I found them a bit fussy too. I think they are Korean or Chinese.)
I'd vote Source Code Pro and Inconsolata-g