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Just a few things about fonts for programmers

While not a complete list by any stretch, this article will hopefully at least serve as a collection of some pretty decent typefaces for text editors and IDEs.  As for the reasons why one would need to put any real thought into what typeface to use in his or her editor, consider the following things that experience has rendered.

A programmer's font should:
  • Avoid ambiguity between characters.  This is specifically true for characters such as 1 and l, and 0 and O.
  • Should be clear even when italicized.  Many editors italicize comments by default.
  • Be mono-spaced, which will assist with justification.

Panic Sans
There is no place to download this font as it ships with Panic Coda.

DejaVu Mono
http://www.dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/Main_Page

Droid Sans Mono
http://damieng.com/blog/2007/11/14/droid-font-family-courtesy-of-google-ascender

NOTE:  The items above are URLs to packages of fonts that include the specifically named sans, mono, et cetera versions.

As an aside, for the purists out there, the near ubiquitous Arial and Times New Roman are not freely available fonts.  That is, not free as in liberty. The GNU FreeFont is however and does a respectable job of substituting in most cases.  Paragraphs written with each take about the same amount of space, but a lighter rendering of the typefaces may be noticeable on some systems.  This will most likely be the case with FreeSans.

GNU FreeFont
https://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/

For more input on the matter of fonts for programmers, plenty more can be had with the following articles.

Top 10 Programming Fonts
http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts

Finding the Perfect Programming Font
http://www.command-tab.com/2008/02/19/finding-the-perfect-programming-font/

Droid Sans Mono great coding font
http://damieng.com/blog/2007/11/14/droid-sans-mono-great-coding-font

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