From Joel via MeteFilter’s thread on Arial vs Helvetica, I discovered ProFont, a monospaced font for programming (for Windows, Linux & Mac). Well, not that it’s “only for programming”, but that’s where it may be best suited.
According to his site, Tobias Jung was desperately seeking ProFont for quite some time. It was available on his Mac OS 9.1 box but he couldn’t find a suitable clone for his Windows setup at work. And, to his credit, Tobias doesn’t just wax nostalgic about the font; he also offers some compelling reasons for using it:
- Slashed zeros
- Differentiated Is and Ones
- Distinct punctuation (colons, semicolons, et al)
- Oversized parenthesis (and presumably brackets as well)
In short, it appears that ProFont has almost all you could ask for in a programming font. My only concern is that, while Tobias cites its small bitmapped nature as a benefit, I might find ProFont a bit tough to read at 1600x1200. Still, I think I’ll give it a chance (If you try it, Joel recommends the FON version, not the TTF version.)
Awesome! This is my xterm font now!
*schweet*
Hi,
You might also want to try
these programming fonts…
There are 4 variations at different sizes. One of them, Proggy Clean, is slightly larger.
For a really good strong, bold, font that gives max number of lines and columns for each font size look at http://www.procon.com.au/Fonts.htm. They have FON and TTF versions of their HVEDIT font there and it is great at all sizes.