![]() ![]() Larger x-height and short ascenders and descenders contribute to a better legibility, but what about character designs? Let’s take a look at the usuals. That’s just a personal preference though. I like my code to be able to “breathe” in my code editor. This is good for legibility but I’m not sure about the semi-condensed part. By far the largest from all of the five fonts. Monoid is semi-condensed which results in a large x-height. Too bad it doesn’t support some of the popular code editors. Monoid supports a decent range of ligatures and they look good. That includes Visual Studio, Sublime Text and Notepad++. The smaller range of ligatures isn’t Monoid’s primary problem though, it’s the fact that they don’t work on some popular code editors. It’s not a big range of ligatures but it’s ok to work with. Monoid has the most basic ligatures for coding which should cover 80% of what a programmer needs. This is what Monoid looks like in action. Its authors describe it as “Semi-condensed and distinguishable glyphs with short ascenders and descenders, big apertures and supersized operators and punctuation.” Sounds interesting, let’s take a closer look! Monoid is the monospaced font that stands out the most from the ones I write about in this post. So not good scores on the ligatures and legibility of Iosenka, but we do have to give credit to the authors for producing 9 weights and they all come with their italic and oblique counterparts. Iosenka’s legibility of the most problematic letters could be improved. And coding fonts usually are used at smaller sizes. They’re not that easy to tell apart, especially at smaller sizes. If we check the “1lI” and “O0” characters which often suffer the most from poor legibility, we can see that they’re very similar. I decided to score Iosevka’s legibility as “not that good”, partly because of this somewhat condensed style, but also because of particular characters designs. Iosenka’s x-height is very similar to Fira Code’s. Now that we’re having a closer look, I noticed that Iosenka seems to be somewhat condensed. We can see straight away that their x-height is similar so I’ll conclude that Iosenka’s x-height is regular too. Iosenka supports a good range of ligatures but they could look better. Iosenka could improve its ligatures design a bit. For a coding font, I really like it to be explicit and the code set in it readable. The angles used in arrows and some of the sizes used look a bit strange. There’s a ton of ligatures in Iosevka but I must say, some of them don’t look as good as in other fonts from this article. This is what Iosevka looks like in action. Iosevka is described as a “slender monospaced sans-serif and slab-serif typeface designed to be the ideal font for programming.” Lots of OpenType features supported and a Retina weight that looks really good on Retina screens. They’re differently shaped and the zero character comes with either a slashed or a dotted design. The “O” and “0” characters are also different enough to tell them apart immediately. This is an extremely important thing when it comes to coding where a single misspelt character can break the code. The “1”, “l” and “I” characters, for example, are clearly distinguishable. When it comes to legibility, Fira Code does a really good job. This is another property that makes it a good baseline to compare other fonts to.įira Code’s x-height is quite standard, perfect for comparing with other fonts. ![]() Not small, not large, somewhere in between. For example, it even has a Code’s x-height is what I would call “regular”. If not the most, definitely the widest range of all the different ligatures supported. It seems that from all five fonts in this article Fira Code has the most ligatures. This is what Fira Code looks like in action. Perfect reason for using it as a baseline. ![]() It also seems that it’s become quite popular since its release so a lot of you may be using it. ![]() I wanted to have it first on the list as I used it for quite a while and I want to compare all others to it. This is a really cool monospaced font based on Fira Mono from Mozilla. Here are the five fonts I considered the best, all of them are free to download and use. That wasn’t long ago, but I recently did even more research into monospaced fonts and found my new favourite, you can see it at the bottom of this article. That change also led me to explore monospaced fonts suitable for coding as I worked on customising my VS Code theme.Īt some point, I found Fira Code and loved the fact that it had coding ligatures, so I made the switch. I’d always used the Monaco font and Sublime Text for coding but I recently decided to switch to VS Code. ![]()
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