My favourite programming font

When you spend half your day in front of a computer, inside an IDE or terminal, I start to make everything feel cozy. Just like when a person moves in a new house, they start decorating. I do the same for each and every machine I own. I set my aliases, paths, scripts, etc. But one thing I must really have in order to feel “at home” on a machine is my favourite font, Source Code Pro.

Why?

I’ll start with things that I hate about other fonts or most fonts. First of all, I dislike proportionally spaced fonts (non-monospace). Some might consider monospaced fonts too technical or not business-like, but not me. When I have to send an email, I use Verdana, looks professional enough and it’s monospaced.

When it comes to programming there is no doubt about what type of font you should use, and this is not just an opinion. Monospaced fonts are the only type of font you should be using. It allows your code to get that nice alignment and the satisfaction of variables/function names aligning.

char* input;		//
int   count;		//
int   index;		//

// Some comment goes here
typedef struct node {
		// stuff ...
}

Another aspect that I find crucial for a font is the difference between i I l | should be clear! There are fonts where the string iIiiIill|i could be composed of any character from above at the first sight.

Image of the string Il| in a crappy font.

Image of the string iIl in Source Code Pro.

Powerline

Source Code Pro is not the only font that supports power line, and heck, there are many fonts just like Source Code Pro, and I can use other similar fonts without any problem. But I could never use a non-powerline font. Who would want to live in a terminal without such a beauty?

Conclusion

Any programmer worth their silicon should use a monospaced font. Expect some more posts about my dev environment as I will be working on setup.sh in the following weeks when I have some spare time and join me in my journey or re-setting up some of my machines.