Programming Fonts (programmingfonts.org)

Pragmata Pro is several notches above in overall quality IMHO. Hand-hinting at smaller sizes makes a world of difference if this is important to you. This means you can use the same font from low-res console to a 4k monitor and will consistently look wonderful.

At higher DPI settings, Pragmata has a more cohesive sense of style. This is hard to quantify as it's quite subjective, but as pixel-perfect issues go away, the overall artistic direction start to become very important IMHO. The fact that this is done by a single individual shows in both little details and overall direction.

I'm not trying to push Pragmata, I just want to say that I think the price is fully justified and absolutely worth it. The work that went into the fontset is absolutely huge.

And as I said before, I also like Iosevka. Wonderful effort as well. It's slightly less packed, which I'm not super-fond of, and I find it only really shines if you have a high-DPI monitor. I use the different stylistic sets in my editor to subtly highlight different keywords.

I've been loving Noto Sans Mono Condensed these days as well.

I find color themes with more than one or two front face hues to be tiring to look at.

For the same reasons you'd want to use italics in a proportional font - for emphasis or contrast.

1. Syntax highlighting which uses both color and font style, e.g. class name are italicised by default in my editor (Sublime Text).

2. Editing markdown/HTML files with italics tags/markup.

3. Also, italics also work on the console, and some console/TUI apps may use it.

[1] https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/

I also prefer the lack of them, exactly because they apply to strings and comments too, where they are often undesired.

I write Clojure code most of the time, so maybe that's a deciding factor too...

https://docs.raku.org/language/unicode_ascii just kind of rubs me as the wrong way to go.

While I realize '…' and '...' are syntactically equivalent, it means that if someone is writing $foo³ and I need to change that to $foo² - I can't do that without changing it to $foo**2 ... and that results in two different styles of code (unicode and ascii) in the same file which means that future maintainer me has more difficulty.

(note: I still don't know how to type ³ - that's me copying out of another file)

      int x = 3;
      if (x<-5) {
        return 1;
      }

      int x = 3;
      if (x⬅5) {
        return 1;
      }