Sun, 30 Jan 2011

My Coding Font

Guru Meditation #0000002.0000ABCD


Sometimes I stumble across people posting about their favourite font for coding. That, of course, results in endless discussions leading nowhere, because it is a highly subjective matter. Well, it’s about time to throw my font of choice into the mix.

Because I started coding on an Amiga 500 and moved on to MS-DOS and Borland’s Turbo Pascal later, I have always been surrounded by strong and bold fonts. There were no fonts with fine lines that needed anti-aliasing or subpixel rendering. Let alone that anyone would waste precious cycles on something like that.

Hence I kept using a font that carries the spirit of those bold fonts into the age of Windows: Fixedsys. But as Unicode became more of an issue, I was glad to find Fixedsys Excelsior, which is just like Fixedsys but with a huge number of Unicode glyphs added.

Comparison of Fixedsys with two other popular fixed-width fonts on Windows

And because it is big and doesn’t use any subpixel rendering I think it puts less strain on the eyes. Besides, who doesn’t like big friendly letters? Especially if they are printed on the cover of a book, which also happens to be cheaper than its competition?

3x magnification

Of course I use Fixedsys not only within Vim for coding, but also for window titles, E-mails, instant messages, PuTTY sessions, …


Enable Javascript to see comments