I love Consolas, but Inconsolata (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconsolata) is a nice, friendly, take on it. I'd check it out if you haven't already–it's what I now use exclusively!
Just tried it out on Windows 7 with ClearType (same settings I use with Consolas). I don't know if there's a problem with the way ClearType is rendering the font or what, but it looks terrible on my system. Is ClearType supposed to be disabled or what?
Yes, it will look weird because Consolas was designed specifically for ClearType (which is why it looks nowhere as good on OS X). Inconsolata was designed without it.
Similarly, Monaco doesn't look half as good on Windows :) Text rendering differs on OS X and Windows.
Consolas was designed for ClearType, but on a Mac, Consolas seems a touch heavy to me. Lucida Sans Typewriter and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono are also somewhat heavy, as are Menlo and Mensch.
I find Andale Mono to be the perfect blend of legibility, distinctive character forms, and lightness, for black letters on white background. With its shorter and rounded letterforms providing a sense of white space between lines, I suspect this font is reminding me of highly legible daisy wheel printouts. This is my font of choice for both coding and plain-text email. It's not as widely known, but people who use it become somewhat fanatical.
In Terminal I use amber on black, and find Monaco 10pt. better because of the line height and old school terminal feel. I suspect this font reminds me of the plotter-style vector fonts pre-dating MS-DOS. Like Consolas, Monaco has a slash through the zero, which I much prefer.
Just for fun, try http://sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/ in 20 pt (15 pt in Windows) terminal window. It's a DEC VT220 terminal glyph font complete with raster lines.
Sort of off-topic: I changed my Rxvt font in .Xresources from Envy Code R to Inconsolata to try it out, and the colors in my terminal got darker. Changing the font back to Envy Code R makes them bright again. (I use a dark background and normally the bright flavors of green, cyan, blue, etc.).
Why would changing the font affect the brightness of the colors in the terminal?
Personally, I found myself wondering why I'd want to use a font from somebody that cared little enough about readability to use a font like that on their webpage.
Almost every single one of his replacements hurts my eyes. The 0 I like, the 1 looks like it was chopped from the left, the z-3 is ugly, the and sign could have been nice but the top part is too small and off to the left, the Q's tail looks abominable, and those angle brackets look as large as Cleopatra's nose.
I think the original artist drew the L weirdly to make it extremely clear that it’s not a one, but if you draw a gothic one, the difference is obvious even with a simpler L.
And that might be fine if you see an l and a 1 next to each other and you want to know which is which. In the real world where you see one or the other and want to know which it is, this is really unhelpful.
Indeed I have not yet seen a monospaced font that distinguished l (el) and 1 (one) meaningfully. Hell the font I am typing with in the compose field differs by perhaps one pixel.
Would have privately replied (as this thread is a bit old now) but no contact details so:
On my iMac I find that Menlo has a very subtle fuzziness to its characters. Monaco (10pt) remains my setting for now. Despite being not very pretty, it is very crisp and the letters (aside from l and 1) are very distinct and legible.
Maybe he claims the difference is obvious, but not to my aging eyes (especially at smaller point sizes). Sadly, getting older has had more influence over my choice of fonts than pure stylistic preferences.
And there's more to the angle brackets than enclosing typenames. I'm thinking stream operators, for which a shorter angle bracket seems more appropriate. Like the rest, though.
I tried it in Visual Stdio and noticed this font has ligatures. as between f and i in the word "specified". It looks horrible in a fixed width font since the other letters are separated from each other. Additionally, somehow Visual Studio treats the letter pair as a single letter, so you can only select or erase the pair as whole. Not very usable.
I don't have Menlo on this computer (still on Leopard), but from what I can tell from comparing this font to my current coding font, Droid Sans Mono, they must be very similar. It's okay, but it looks like all the things that annoy me about Mensch are the things that were changed from Menlo!
I also prefer the dot in the zero. But the l shape is too close of the number 1. The original font is better on this regard. There is more space between the dot and the bar in the exclamation mark which makes it more different of avertical bar.
The angle brackets on this png are fine, unlike on the examples on the original page.
I've just downloaded Mensch, and on my box too the angle brackets are fine, with an angle between the lines of about 55 degrees, as opposed to about 85 degrees on the original page; so it would appear the downloadable font is different from that described no the page.
I got a kick out of the post, how he starts off with the intent of fixing the "0" and then I quick-scrolled down to the screenshot and noticed there were a lot more corrections than just the "0" -- that's totally something I would have done too once I had the font opened in an editor :)
Either way, really like the widened GT and LT chars for coding, thanks!
I like most of the changes, and I am definitely going to try it out (I'm using Inconsolata and must say I love it quite dearly). There's one thing I can say I don't like about Mensch, however, and that is the lowercase "q". It is very close to an "a" or "alpha". Reading "query" in the rendered example feels wrong.
This guy clearly doesn’t understand the subtleties of typography, given some of the edits he’s made to this font.... that’s okay though, because if he likes it better and it works for him, everyone’s still happy.
Same here. I always come back to this font after a safari through font country looking for alternative programming fonts. I really like the 'square' look.
I've tried most other fonts for a while and DejaVu Sans Mono for the longest time because it supports so many of the unicode characters, but I really don't need them when programming (or doing most other things on the computer, but then I come from a region where the default ASCII set is almost good enough).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolas