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I remember these. A(nother) programmer friend of mine sent me a link to an article on “programming fonts” a while ago, yet I don’t feel I spend enough time in UltraEdit to warrant it. But the theory behind it is sound. I spend all day in Dreamweaver and Flash, and indeed it is the smallest of quirks that slow down the process. If something as tiny as easily identifying 1 from l could be sped up, I’d go for it right away.

It’s funny, I studied typography in design school, and we discussed print fonts, screen fonts, reading fonts, display fonts et. al. — But never “programming” fonts. Come to think of it, I think programming fonts share some of their characteristics with television subtitle fonts? That is, some, as you mention, troublesome characters, such as 1/l, b/6, etc. are “exaggerated” in their shapes, to make them more distinguishable.

Come to think of it — wasn’t Bitstream Vera (not mono) designed for just that, subtitling?

Come to think of it - wasn’t Bitstream Vera (not mono) designed for just that, subtitling?

I have no idea Joen. It wouldn’t surprise me though, the font is very easy to read.

I’ve been using Courier New for ages. I tried Lucida Console for a while, but somehow ended up back on Courier…

I’ll try this Bitstream font and see how I get on.

My preference in terms of fonts for programmer is ProFont, which is extremely readable despite it’s small size (it’s a Bitmap-Font optimized to 8px)

I’ve blogged about it here

Philip

ProFont is a good programmer’s font Pilif. It is very legible even at small point sizes (as you pointed out).

It’s a subjective thing though isn’t it? I’m more comfortable with Bitstream for source code.

As it happens, I do actually use ProFont, but for other purposes (console windows, etc).