Programming Fonts

I do like a good font it has to be said. One current favourite is Open Sans but as a programming font a non mono-spaced font is useless, no matter how much you like it, programming fonts really need to be mono-spaced. Open Sans is clean and elegant and very easy to read on a screen. The light version in particular is very nice. But when it comes to writing code you need something a little bit more controlled and of course mono-spaced.

I thought I’d start keeping a page on my site dedicated to a collection of good alternative fonts for us developers. I specialise in .NET and C# so I spend a lot of time in Visual Studio and more recently Rider, either reading or writing code so a good programming font is particularly important otherwise fatigue can set in pretty quickly. When you have a lot of code on-screen being able to clearly identify things is paramount.

A programming font needs to suitable for at-a-glace “reading” as you aren’t looking for words as such but looking for symbols as references to objects and instances. Enabling the ligatures is also a good idea in order to further symolise your code.

The default font in Visual Studio for the various code editors is Consolas which, to be honest, is a really great programming font, however it can’t hurt to have a look at some alternatives now and again. So below you’ll find a list of fonts you might want to check out.

The font I’m currently using, and love, is Hack.