Ronalds Vilciņš

Top monospaced fonts for coding

A good choice of font for your coding can make a huge difference and improve your productivity, so take a look at the fonts in this post that can make your text editor or terminal emulator look little bit nicer.

  1. MonoLisa — designed by professionals to improve developers’ productivity. MonoLisa features a few unique techniques that increase the legibility and make it visually pleasant to look at for longer periods of time.

  2. Andale® Mono — is a monospaced sans-serif typeface designed by Steve Matteson for terminal emulation and software development environments, originally for the Taligent project by Apple Inc. and IBM. The Andalé design was originally created by Monotype, as part of Andalé font families.

  3. Aperçu — Aperçu was started in December 2009, and has been trialled and tested through a number of design comissions taken on by The Entente through 2010. The conceit behind Aperçu was to create a synopsis or amalgamation of classic realist typefaces: Johnston, Gill Sans, Neuzeit & Franklin Gothic.

  4. Courier Std — is a typewriter and slab serif font family. This typeface has four styles and was published by Adobe. Courier Std has good Latin language support.

  5. Inconsolata — It is a monospace font, designed for printed code listings and the like. There are a great many “programmer fonts,” designed primarily for use on the screen, but in most cases do not have the attention to detail for high resolution rendering.

  6. Fira Mono — Designed to integrate with the character of the FirefoxOS, the Fira typefaces also aim to cover the legibility needs for a large range of handsets varying in screen quality and rendering.

  7. Source Code Pro — Source Code was designed by Paul D. Hunt as a companion to Source Sans. This complementary family was adapted from the Source design due to a request to create a monospaced version for coding applications. Source Code preserves the design features and vertical proportions of Source Sans, but alters the glyph widths so that they are uniform across all glyphs and weights.

  8. Cousine — Cousine was designed by Steve Matteson as an innovative, refreshing sans serif design that is metrically compatible with Courier New™. Cousine offers improved on-screen readability characteristics and the pan-European WGL character set and solves the needs of developers looking for width-compatible fonts to address document portability across platforms.

  9. Anonymous Pro — Anonymous Pro (2009) is a family of four fixed-width fonts designed with coding in mind. Anonymous Pro features an international, Unicode-based character set, with support for most Western and Central European Latin-based languages, plus Greek and Cyrillic. Anonymous Pro is based on an earlier font, Anonymous™ (2001), my TrueType version of Anonymous 9, a Macintosh bitmap font developed in the mid-’90s by Susan Lesch and David Lamkins. Anonymous Pro is distributed with the Open Font License (OFL).

  10. Droid Sans Mono — Droid Sans Mono is a fixed width version of Droid Sans. The Droid Sans Mono typefaces were designed by Steve Matteson of Ascender Corp. The Droid Sans Mono fonts feature non-proportional spacing for displaying text in a tabular setting and other uses where a monospaced font is desired. Droid Sans Mono has excellent legibility characteristics in its letterforms.

  11. Oxygen Mono — Oxygen Mono is the monospace companion family to Oxygen, the KDE project UI and brand type.

  12. Cutive Mono — The design of Cutive, and this monospace sister family Cutive Mono, is based on a number of classic typewriter typefaces, in particular the faces of IBM’s ‘Executive,’ and the older ‘Smith-Premier.’ In Cutive these old faces re-emerge as webfonts that are useful for adding character to body texts as well as in larger sizes for headers and display.

  13. Lekton — Lekton has been designed at ISIA Urbino, Italy, and is inspired by some of the typefaces used on the Olivetti typewriters.

  14. PT Mono — PT Mono was developed for specific uses in forms, tables, worksheets and other contexts. Equal character widths are very helpful in setting complex documents, as with such a font you may easily calculate size of entry fields, column widths in tables and so on. One of the most important areas of use is in governmental web sites where visitors have to fill different forms. Currently PT Mono consists of just one Regular style.

  15. Hack — Hack is designed to be a workhorse typeface for code. It has deep roots in the libre, open source typeface community and expands upon the contributions of the Bitstream Vera & DejaVu projects.

  16. Ubuntu Mono — The Ubuntu Font Family are a set of matching new libre/open fonts in development during 2010–2011. The development is being funded by Canonical Ltd on behalf the wider Free Software community and the Ubuntu project. The technical font design work and implementation is being undertaken by Dalton Maag.

  17. Space Mono — Space Mono is an original fixed-width type family designed by Colophon Foundry for Google Design. It supports a Latin Extended glyph set, enabling typesetting for English and other Western European languages.

  18. Roboto Mono — Roboto Mono is a monospaced addition to the Roboto type family. Like the other members of the Roboto family, the fonts are optimized for readability on screens across a wide variety of devices and reading environments. While the monospaced version is related to its variable width cousin, it doesn’t hesitate to change forms to better fit the constraints of a monospaced environment.

  19. Operator Mono — A typeface rooted in the traditions of typewriting, Operator is designed to offer a new voice for designers, and a new tool for developers.

  20. Input — Input takes its aesthetic cues from monospaced fonts and pixel fonts designed for consoles and screens, but casts off the technical limitations that constrained them. Inspired by Matthew Carter’s process for creating Verdana, David Jonathan Ross began designing Input as a bitmap font.

  21. Consolas — Consolas is aimed for use in programming environments and other circumstances where a monospaced font is specified. All characters have the same width, like old typewriters, making it a good choice for personal and business correspondance. The improved Windows font display allowed a design with proportions closer to normal text than traditional monospaced fonts like Courier.

  22. Liberation Mono — Developed by Steve Matteson of Ascender Corporation as Ascender Sans and Ascender Serif. A variant of this font family, with the addition of a monospaced font and open-source license, was licensed by Red Hat, Inc. as the Liberation font family.

  23. Fira Code — Monospaced font with programming ligatures.

  24. Monaco — Monaco is a monospaced sans-serif typeface designed by Susan Kare and Kris Holmes. It ships with OS X and was already present with all previous versions of the Mac operating system.

  25. Office Code Pro — Office Code Pro is a customized version of Source Code Pro, the monospaced sans serif originally created by Paul D. Hunt for Adobe Systems Incorporated. The customizations were made specifically for text editors and coding environments, but are still very usable in other applications.

  26. PragmataPro — PragmataPro™ is a condensed monospaced font optimized for screen, designed to be the ideal font for coding, math and engineering.

  27. Cartograph CF — Pairing the efficiency of a monospaced font with warmth and character, Cartograph CF is a handsome font family featuring both fixed-pitch and proportional sans versions. A tribute to the utilitarian beauty of terminals and typewriters, Cartograph excels in any setting.