Top 5 Programming Fonts

Everyone has their ideal development setup, and many have spent countless hours customizing it to perfectly suit their needs. Outside of a color scheme, the next typical change is the font in use and every year new fonts are introduced giving us more to choose from than ever before.

To find out what everyone is using, I asked on Twitter and Facebook and had a ton of responses. Based on the answers here is a list of the top 5 programming fonts in use today

#Fira Code

Fira Code by Nikita Prokopov is a unique font in that it puts particular attention to the ligatures.

#Operator Mono

Operator Mono by Hoefler & Co. is a surprise addition for me because it’s a commercial font with the base price being $199.

I’ve been a fan of this since it was first released and I love the way it makes comments. That is what initially drew me to it and it continues to be my primary font.

#Hack

Hack by Chris Simpkins.

It is designed to be a workhorse typeface for code. It has deep roots in the libre, open source typeface community and expands upon the contributions of the Bitstream Vera & DejaVu projects.

#Menlo

Menlo is designed by Jim Lyles and included by default on Mac’s since Snow Leopard. For those on Windows, an alternative is Meslo.

#Source Code Pro

Source Code Pro released by Adobe and designed by Paul D. Hunt. Source Code preserves the design features and vertical proportions of Source Sans but alters the glyph widths so that they are uniform across all glyphs and weights.

#Inconsolata

Inconsolata by Raph Levien is a surprise addition to this list for me because it’s been around a long time. Its first release was in 2006 and continues to be wildly used.

#Honorable Mentions

Outside of these five, a lot of others were recommended and here is a list:

• Monaco
• Input Mono
• Edlo
• Calibri
• Consolas
• Deja vu sans mono
• Fantasque Sans Mono
• Space Mono

And of course no survey would be complete without a few crazy people mentioning the worst fonts ever for coding:

• Papyrus
• Comic Sans
• Wingdings
• Times New Roman

Any of these fonts would make an excellent choice for your development toolset, and the screenshots came from the Atom editor with the following customizations:

• Font Size: 12px;
• Line Height 2.5

Then for the italics, I customized the main styles.less stylesheet found in settings -> themes -> “your stylesheet”:

.entity.other.attribute-name, atom-text-editor::shadow .comment {
    font-style: italic;
}
atom-text-editor::shadow{
    .entity.other.attribute-name {
        font-style: italic;
    }
}