Tangental, but I'm wondering if I'm the only one who really dislikes ligatures? I mean, some people say they simply don't prefer them, but I actually struggle to read and edit code with ligatures. Looking at a single character, pressing Backspace, and seeing it cut in half and transform is very disorienting, it breaks all my intuitions about text editing.
I ended up googling how to disable ligatures in CSS, went to the developer tools and hunted down where they're being enabled so I could use the website. It's on the
Fellow ligature-disliker reporting in! It messes with my typing intuition that when I hit a key, a new character is not printed on the screen (instead, the last character is altered).
My gripe with ligatures is this: when they are rendered as a single character, I get weirded out by editing them because they change in the editor on the fly. I prefer to have code "as is" without having to think about the context within which this or that character or ligature is rendered, because it's very distracting, disruptive even.
(Sorry for offtopic, but does anyone else have upvote/downvote buttons not visible for freetonik's comment?)
Same. Came here to say there's no option to only show me fonts that don't use ligatures (and some come in both/multiple flavours). That checkbox needs to be tri-state.
Thanks for this link, this site is much more complete than the submitted one, and also has more filtering options. The only strange thing is that selecting a language changes the syntax highlighting, but the code stays in JavaScript.
My current favorite is https://www.programmingfonts.org/#go-mono (and not just for Go!). Yeah, I prefer serif fonts, apparently I'm in a minority (16 serif fonts vs. 136 sans serif on this site).
Something I wish I saw more often are monospace fonts designed for readability (codingability?) that have narrower character width.
Iosevka is one of them, but to me the negative spaces between characters in it are too little for good readability, in other words it feels too "square"-ish. Other fonts close to it in style have other issues. I've been using M+ fonts for coding for more than a decade I think, and tried to switch but always returned to them. If you're somebody like me, check them out: https://mplusfonts.github.io
In terminals I'm using Source Code Pro or IBM Plex Pro and they work really well for me.
Also turns out IBM Plex Sans can be a solid font for designing dashboards, tables and generally more "technical" UIs, so whoever worked on that font familiy did a really good job imo.
And if you like iA Writer, they based their fonts off IBM Plex and you can get them for yourself too: https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts
What convinced you to switch from Fira to Berkeley? I recently switched from SF to Fira because there wasn't enough visual difference between certain characters (1 and l, for example). I've been pretty happy with Fira so far.
I personally tried a lot of dev fonts several times over the years but keep coming back to dejavu sans mono, which is always missing for some reason from showcases like this. I find all the others to be imbalanced. Too wide, to skinny, too short, etc.
Dev fonts is usually synonymous with fixed width (mono) fonts, and for good reasons. Those reasons are discussed by iA Writer in interesting detail [1]. However they do so as a precursor to their own duospace font, "iA Writer Duo" [2].
It's a compromise, but one that works well (for me). Basically IBM Plex but with m, M, w, and W being 50% wider than all the other characters.
Sounds odd, but is very legible and usually fine depending upon the context of its use.
Every time I try a new one, I always end up going back to the font I've been using for something like 10+ years, which isn't on that list, Meslo LGM - although these days I use the NerdFont variation.
Readit News
I ended up googling how to disable ligatures in CSS, went to the developer tools and hunted down where they're being enabled so I could use the website. It's on the
rule (codemirror.css:240), you can edit it to:But for code, they're just an abomination.
An example is >>=, which is "inplace shr" in some languages, but "monad bind" in others. A unified ligature for >>= really confuses me.
(Sorry for offtopic, but does anyone else have upvote/downvote buttons not visible for freetonik's comment?)
My current favorite is https://www.programmingfonts.org/#go-mono (and not just for Go!). Yeah, I prefer serif fonts, apparently I'm in a minority (16 serif fonts vs. 136 sans serif on this site).
The reason SF Mono and Monaco are not on the list is probably because they are proprietary.
Iosevka is one of them, but to me the negative spaces between characters in it are too little for good readability, in other words it feels too "square"-ish. Other fonts close to it in style have other issues. I've been using M+ fonts for coding for more than a decade I think, and tried to switch but always returned to them. If you're somebody like me, check them out: https://mplusfonts.github.io
In terminals I'm using Source Code Pro or IBM Plex Pro and they work really well for me.
Also turns out IBM Plex Sans can be a solid font for designing dashboards, tables and generally more "technical" UIs, so whoever worked on that font familiy did a really good job imo.
And if you like iA Writer, they based their fonts off IBM Plex and you can get them for yourself too: https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts
It's a compromise, but one that works well (for me). Basically IBM Plex but with m, M, w, and W being 50% wider than all the other characters.
Sounds odd, but is very legible and usually fine depending upon the context of its use.
[1] https://ia.net/topics/in-search-of-the-perfect-writing-font
[2] https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts
Proportional fonts are simply more legible, and programming with them is great.