You may not give much thought to the font you currently use for coding. You are probably happy with the default monospaced font that comes with your favorite IDE, and over time, you’ve become accustomed to it.
These fonts may be the best fonts for you, but are they actually good for general coding? I would never tell you which font is good (currently, I am using Ubuntu Mono Regular) or bad, as there is no way to categorically measure it. It does come down to each coder’s preference. But there are certain fonts freely available designed purely with programmers and coders in mind, which you may like to consider.
With this post, I just wanted to highlight some of the best free monospaced fonts that have been optimized for programming and also offer some basic pointers for selecting a particular font.
So what should you be looking for in a good monospaced programming font? For starters, it has to be clear and highly readable, proportionally spaced, and for obvious reasons, needs to come packaged with an extended character set with distinguishable glyphs. And perhaps more importantly than legibility, the ‘1’, ‘i’ & ‘l’ and ‘o’, ‘0’ & ‘O’ have to be clearly identifiable as different characters.
Anonymous Pro by Mark Simonson (Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic)
Alma Mono by Envato Elements
Hermit by Pablo Caro (Light, Medium & Bold)
Edlo by Eric Hamiter
Meslo by André Berg (LG Small, LG Medium & LG Large)
Vera Sans Mono by Bitstream (Roman, Oblique, Bold & Bold Oblique)
Fira Mono by Mozilla (Regular & Bold)
PT Mono by Alexandra Korolkova (Regular & Bold)
Envy Code by Damien Guard (Regular, Italic & Bold)
Fantasque Sans Mono by Jany Belluz (Regular, Italic & Bold)
BPmono by Backpacker (Regular, Italic & Bold)
DejaVu (Regular, Oblique, Bold & Bold Oblique)
Monaco by Susan Kare and Kris Holmes for OS X
