Comment by KronisLV

2 years ago

Personally, I've stuck with free fonts most of the time. For programming, currently I tend to use:

Liberation Mono: from the very same package of fonts that are included in LibreOffice, I find it to be surprisingly readable and easy on the eyes for most kinds of code or monospaced text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts

PT Mono: while initially I really liked PT Sans and PT Serif separately (they're currently the fonts for my homepage/blog), their monospaced offering is also quite nice; albeit when there's some light colored text (e.g. comments) at the smaller font sizes, the full stop character can become a bit harder to see. Here's more information about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PT_Fonts

Here's a quick comparison, comparing the two fonts against Consolas and JetBrains Mono (with some Java code, taken from a throwaway project): https://imgur.com/a/mr9afqT

Personally, out of all of them Liberation Mono feels like the most readable, whereas PT Mono just appeals to me stylistically on some level. However, paid fonts, like the linked one are also great - whatever feels more pleasant to stare at for a large number of hours per day!

6 comments

KronisLV

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kitsunesoba  2 years ago

PT Mono was my goto for a long time. For the past few years I've been running Dank Mono[0].

The Liberation font don't look bad but their wideness as well as that of other common FOSS fonts like the Vera/Bitstream fonts has always bugged me for some reason. Whenever I do a fresh Linux install and the desktop is configured to use one of those I have to download and install Inter UI or Ubuntu Sans as the UI font for it to not bug me.

[0]: https://philpl.gumroad.com/l/dank-mono [1]: https://rsms.me/inter/ [2]: https://design.ubuntu.com/font

  • KronisLV  2 years ago

    > The Liberation font don't look bad but their wideness as well as that of other common FOSS fonts like the Vera/Bitstream fonts has always bugged me for some reason.

    Ohh, that's a fair point. I guess it's very obvious in the comparison, when you look at something like Consolas and any of the others.

    I've heard good things about Iosevka, when you care a lot about horizontal compactness: https://typeof.net/Iosevka/

jjraden  2 years ago

Thanks for posting that comparison. I really wanted to like Liberation Mono, as I'm a big fan of the whole LibreOffice project in general, but I find that, when compared side by side, I actually prefer Jetbrains Mono over the other three.

nbk_2000  2 years ago

Same here, I try out a lot of monospace fonts as they come along. But Liberation Mono just scratches all my itches so well.

I do however enjoy setting comments using fonts that aren't monospaced (which I begrudgingly acknowledge Comic Sans is actually decent for).

At some point though the old typographers adage of "people read best, what they read most" must impact our preferences.

  • seanmcdirmid  2 years ago

    Ive been using proportional fonts for coding for more than a decade now, and I can’t go back to mono space. I just wish there was a proportional programming font with ligatures, but I’m ok doing without if it means going monospace.