Best Fonts for Programming / Developers

As many nerds I have a super hard time to not try a thing I read about, so I'll try to trim down your journey of trying out all the best fonts that are made specifically for code editing.

A good font can make your development experience more pleasant by having everything more easily readable and also to prevent typos between characters that in other fonts are close to indistinguishable like lower l and uppercase I or the digit 1.

Some fonts or variations of the fonts featured feature custom ligatures that have slightly more mathy or academic symbols for things that are used a lot in programming specifically like ==, !== or ===.

Currently on the list:

Source Code Pro

This was the first font I heard of that specifically was created with developers in mind, although historically it probably isn't ;). Source Code Pro is a solid choice for everybody who wants clearly separable glyphs and no weird ligatures, but just good old = symbols. 01

Fira Mono / Fira Code

Fira Mono is made by Mozilla and looks great. It has easily distinguishable characters and digits and a slight hint of serifs, but not really. Compared to a font like Courier, it looks a bit more elegant and polished.

Fira Code is a variant or fork of Fira Mono and has the ligatures that introduces morphed glyphs for a lot of expressions that are relevant for programming as seen below:

Iosevka

Iosevka is a pretty awesome font that seems a little taller than the other ones, but it's still a very solid choice for coding anything. I'm currently using Iosevka Term, which doesn't include the special ligatures seen below:

Depending on taste you can pick which ever combination you like, there is a comparison table on the downloads page.

Summary

In the end it's a matter of taste, but I recommend taking at least a day to try out each of the fonts in order to find out if you like them or not.

Have I forgotten a font? Which ones to you prefer when working with code on a day to day basis?

Tagged with: #Adobe #Fira #Iosevka #Microsoft #Mozilla #source code pro

Thank you for reading! If you have any comments, additions or questions, please tweet or toot them at me!