I discovered Inconsolata two years ago or so, and it's been my go-to monospaced font ever since. I have it set to 11 points anti-aliased and it just looks gorgeous!
For your viewing pleasure, here is what my typical development environment looks like (anti-aliased retina 11pt Inconsolata):
I used to use Inconsolata ever since I came to know about it.
But, after the monospaced variant of Ubuntu font is released, I switched away from Inconsolata. It is a great font, but Ubuntu Mono is better looking for my taste.
i recently switched to ubuntu on one machine. that font was one of the best parts of switching. it's amazing how much difference it makes to the feel of the system.
Cool, your Consolas vs Inconsolata overlay comparison made me understand why I just love Consolas so much and have grown to hate any other fixed width font (of course, getting the right antialiasing settings for it on Linux can be a bitch sometimes)... I just like its oversized "[]", "@" and lower than standard "_" and beautiful straight quotes.
Consolas is wonderful and definitely better than Iconsolata. If you like Inconsolata, I highly recommend trying to hunt down a copy of Consolas from Windows (I did this on my Mac for awhile). These days, though, I use Meslo because it allows me to get a bit more line height in a graceful way.
I love Inconsolata on the printed page and it's my go-to font for code listings in LaTeX, but it wasn't really designed for display. On the screen, I prefer something with nice bitmaps at smaller sizes, like Anonymous Pro.
If anyone uses Windows here, note that this font is going to look much worse for you than it does on Mac or Linux. I use the Inconsolata-g variant[1] on Xubuntu and love it, but to my chagrin, it looked wretched on the Windows machine at work: jagged edges everywhere.
The Google Web Fonts version of the original Inconsolata — which has apparently been "properly hinted for Windows"[2] — was a major improvement, but still lacks the buttery smoothness the font has on Linux.
This discrepancy seems to be due to a Linux font setting that lets you choose "slight", "medium" or "full" hinting, with slight being the default. If I choose full, I get the more squared-off, digital-looking font appearance I associate with Windows. I don't have a Mac, but based on screenshots in this thread, the appearance is the same as Linux.
Anyway, good to see Inconsolata getting some attention. A very well-made font.
No truetype font will replace a pixel perfect bitmapped font. Not until we have displays with ridiculous dpi. And until that happens you can't beat terminus as it's perfect.
Yes, I know it's meant for print, but people here mention it in the context of using it on the screen as well.
I'm afraid you have been misinformed. The perfect bitmap font is the famous 6x13 xterm font from X-Windows. This is a simple statement of incontrovertible fact.
That's not even close to the pixel density of the MBP Retina, or the new 1080p 11" IPS screens.
And given that I paid as much for my T61 a couple years ago as I could've paid for a decent MBP and the screen made my eyes bleed, I'm willing to be the 1600x1200 display was not that great.
I have been using Inconsolata since about a year ago. I was an avid user of tiny pixel fonts, but I felt an increasing amount of strain on my eyes. This worried me since I'm only 23, so I went out to look for bigger fonts. Pixel fonts look horrible in bigger sizes, and I was never a fan of anti-aliasing, so it took me a while before I found something I liked. Inconsolata made me switch, and I never looked back.
Thank you!
I am using Arch Linux with i3 (default config except for some keybindings) and running rxvt-unicode with tmux sessions. The top bar is a dzen2 dock with a custom script feeding it information.
There is no real theme involved, but all the settings on display can be found at my GitHub account.
I tried this and loved it, but it lacks one of the two prime weights (bold, ital), can't remember which. That hurts it because a lot of code editing for me takes place in an environment where all three weights are used, and it kills the monospaced-ness.
Inconsolata has been my font of choice for many years now whenever I have to use antialiased fonts or when I want a large font. It beats all others for readability.
For most of my programming/terminal work, however, I use Proggy Clean, non-antialiased. The amount of context you can put on the screen this way is amazing. Also, once you use a well-designed non-antialiased font for a while, you will have a hard time going back to the fuzzy outlines of vector fonts. I think a retina-quality display will obviate the need for fonts like Proggy Clean, though.
I like this font, but its hinting on Linux sometimes makes it unusable. I keep jumping between Inconsolata-g, Clean, Consolas, Anka/Coder, and Andale Mono, because each one of them has something that just bugs the hell out of me.
I'm still looking for a font that has clean hinting at 8pt on Linux, that doesn't have absolutely atrocious features, and that has a reasonable number of symbols on the mathematical and non-Latin Unicode planes. Fontconfig with Infinality patches helps, but not enough.
having seen a few blogs about this in the past I tried out Inconsolata before, but always reverted back to DejaVuSansMono as I never had much luck with Inconsolata and Konsole..
specifically, the problem I have is:
the top one is Inconsolata, the bottom one DejaVu.. anyone else come across this behaviour before? I'm never sure of what to google to get it sorted.. and haven't managed to figure it out
What I'd like to see (Monty Python Gumby) is some dates on his web page. Maybe a GitHub page. I got Incosolata a few years ago and have been using it since, but he says he's working on it. When was the last update?
I love this font. Someone on here recommended it to me last year when I was in need of a fixed-width font that looked decent at larger point sizes (I was dealing with some cataract issues at the time).
Inconsolata is great for writing URLs in papers because they don't have that blocky look, and they don't stick out on the page from being twice as wide as your serif fonts.
recent awesome discovery: you can use Inconsolata in your google docs to paste in code samples and whatnot, available from the Add Fonts item in the font picker.
I prefer Anonymous because it it's legible at low resolutions. Any font can take advantage of high resolution, it opens up a lot of freedom to the artist.
For your viewing pleasure, here is what my typical development environment looks like (anti-aliased retina 11pt Inconsolata):
http://akhun.com/seo/skitch/Screen_Shot_2012-07-19_at_10.17....