The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff: CcKkOoSsUuVvWwXxZz are much alike.

Lucida Console Sample (thanks Wikimedia!)

I’m in search to see if there is a better programmers font than the monospaced Lucida Console mainly to be used in Visual Studio, Delphi, the Windows console, Xcode and Eclipse.

What I love about Lucida Console design is the relatively large x-height combined with a small leading (often called “line height”).

This combines very readable text, and a lot of code lines in view.

Lucida has two small drawbacks, see the second image at the right:

• The captial O and digit 0 (zero) are very similar.
• Some uppercase/lowercase character pairs are alike (because of the large x-height)

But, since the font hasn’t been updated for a very long time, lots of Unicode code points that are now in current fonts, are missing from Lucida Console (unless you buy the most recent version that has 666 characters from Fonts.com)

Well, there are dozens of monospaced fonts around, so I wonder: which ones do you like?

In the mean while, I’m going to do some experimenting with fonts mentioned in these lists:

• Monospace/Fixed Width Programmer’s Fonts.
• Font Survey: 42 of the Best Monospaced Programming Fonts – CodeProject.
• 10 of the Best Programming Fonts – SitePoint.
• Top 10 Programming Fonts.
• Keith Devens .com – Programming Fonts.
• Fuentes para programación.
• Coding Horror: Revisiting Programming Fonts. (2007)
• Coding Horror: Consolas and ClearType. (2005)
• Coding Horror: Progamming Fonts. (2004)
• Anonymous Pro. / Anonymous Pro: a programming font with style.
• Inconsolata.
• Envy Code R preview #7 (scalable coding font) » DamienG.
• Adding straight single and double quotes to Inconsolata.
• Lucida Console Thin free font download.
• Fonts for web design: a primer – Dev.Opera.

A few fonts I’m considering (I only want scalable fonts, so .fon files are out):

• Anonymous Pro
• Crystal
• Envy Code R preview #7 (scalable coding font)
• Hyperfont
• Inconsolata-dz
• ProFontWindows

–jeroen