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Ask HN: What is your default font for coding and terminal?

25 points by firstSpeaker ↗ HN
Recently I saw that there is a thread with some comments on fonts, specially monospaced fonts. I discovered that there are fonts to buy (had no idea about it) and on top of I discovered few of the fonts that some HNers pointed out.

If you are using a special font for the terminal and your IDE, please share some details :)

103 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] thread
hprotagonist
Menlo or something that looks like it. I’m pretty boring.
ElSinchi
Hack font https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/

Thread closed

PaulHoule
One of those fonts that puts the 0 in 3270.
azemetre
I use this font everywhere as well (alacritty, neovim, vscode, etc), I think I've been using it since it was first posted on HN maybe 7 years ago? It's a great font, especially with the differences between O, 0, l, L, I.

My eyesight is bad so I typically have large font sizes (24 for text, 22 for glyphs/icons). One thing I never want to do is "stress" my eyes by having a hard time reading.

t0bia_s
Iosevka: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka
soneca
Another vote for Iosevka.

I learned about it here on HN. It is great because it is narrow but very clear and easy to read (and free). I like narrow because I like to use side-by-side panels in VSCode, so it fits more characters per line for readable font sizes. Incredible font.

t0bia_s
I love it even for film subtitles. Easy to read and not too much "technical" as other mono fonts.
LarryMade2
my terminal font is OCR-A gotta have that retro-tech style.
Hamuko
ProFontIIx for terminal, Source Code Pro for text editor.
yewenjie
Iosevka with Nerd Fonts patched.
kirbyfan64sos
JetBrains Mono! Used to use Roboto Mono, because I liked how close it was to a standard sans-serif font, but JB Mono is similarly spaced and has the advantage of built-in ligatures and such.
ledgerdev
Wow JBM is very nice, love ligatures and it's so easy to read. Thanks for mentioning it.
mbirth
Also, JBM is available almost everywhere, e.g. it comes with several mobile apps.
dschuessler
Genuine question: What's the appeal of ligatures?

I never got the point. I want to see exactly what's in the document. With ligatures I have to translate what I see back to what I get. It seems like unnecessary cognitive load to me.

ajross
Grumpy curmudgeon here still using DejaVu (and it's Vera Sans ancestor before that). I'm sure there's lots of good choices, but DejaVu is great, it's everywhere and it's free. Just don't see a lot of value in shopping around.
thanatos519
Me too! DejaVuSansMono Nerd Font and when I want serifs, GoMono Nerd Font.
johnmorrison
I've been using JetBrains Mono recently, switching over from SF Mono on MacOS and Fira Code on Windows. SF Mono looks great and Fira Code has nice ligatures, but JBM has the best of both and a really nice shape.

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/

ha1zum
D2Coding by Naver, it's a narrow font but not looking crazy like other narrow fonts
ElectronBadger
Hack. Both in Sublime Text and urxvt terminals. And as a i3 system font. And as a fixed font for Firefox and Thunderbird.
kitsunesoba
For IDEs and text editors, I use Dank Mono[0] 14pt.

On my personal machine, my terminal font is Cozette[1] 13pt, while on my company machine it's Dank Mono[0] 14pt.

In the past I've also used SF Mono[2], Fira Code[3] and Anonymous Pro[4] among others.

[0]: https://philpl.gumroad.com/l/dank-mono [1]: https://github.com/slavfox/Cozette [2]: https://developer.apple.com/fonts/ [3]: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode [4]: https://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro

platz
I cannot stand the trend for the cursive s in programming fonts, but maybe I'm just boomin'
usr1106
I used to spend a lot of time fiddling with visual properties of my desktop in the past.

Nowadays I just install Xubuntu, add i3 and mostly use it as it is. So the terminal happens to be white on black and the Emacs black on white. I don't think about it, but apply the rule they give for healthier sitting: The next position is the healthiest one (meaning switch often).

I don't even know whether my terminal and my Emacs (main tools besides the browser) use the same font or not. Why would that interest me as long as I can read both? Sometimes when something has changed on a new installation (UI people want to do continuous improvement...) it might look ugly at first. After 3 days I don't notice it anymore. Hardly ever that I would spend any time to change it back as it has always been.

If you present online (other than slides) you should know the shortcuts to change the fontsize. And possibly change your cursor and selection color to make them recognizable for remote attendees.

throwingrocks
So which font do you use?
usr1106
I wrote I don't know. Whatever was there by the installation procedure described. (I am at sick leave at the moment. The PC is off not to hinder recovery. The phone is on to raise the feeling...).
usr1106
I you are still reading this. I booted my PC and checked.

Terminal font says DejaVu Sans Mono Book.

Emacs says DejaVu Sans Mono.

I don't know how this font lookup works and I don't want to spend my time on investigating, I guess both use /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf

frakt0x90
The only IDE I've every changed the default font in is Teradata SQL Assistant because the comma was one pixel different from the period and it would confuse me constantly. I'm always a little surprised people are so into coding fonts.
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