While programming may seem interesting, especially if you’re a coding geek, it involves working hours and staring at the code. This makes issues like eye strain and headaches common among software developers and programmers.
Typically, developer tools and software come with monospaced system font, which might work for some, but it leads to poor readability and strain on the eyes of many.
The simple solution to this issue is changing the coding font.
If you’re a programmer facing the issues mentioned above, you can change the code font of your developer tool that’s easy on the eyes, less straining, easy to read, and there’s a clear distinction between the letters.
In this article, we’ll look at some popular coding fonts you can try to have a seamless programming experience.
1. Input
Input provides a flexible font system with proportional and monospaced fonts, with a wide variety of widths, styles, and weights for richer code formatting.
With all its different variations, Input provides over 168 individual font styles with enhanced flexibility to adjust the line spacing, swap out the character defaults for specific symbols, and look at the preview to customize the font per your taste and liking.
Bitmap fonts inspired Input’s font design. The fonts are private; however, you’ll require a license to use them for public projects or websites.
2. Proggy Fonts
Proggy fonts is one of the most beloved fonts amongst programmers that’s simple yet effective for C and C++ coding. However, it’s not exclusive to these two programming languages.
It primarily focuses on C-specific features, such as horizontal centering for brackets and braces and vertical centering for asterisks. Besides, it has multiple variations, including the font’s vector variation for your specific needs.
3. DejaVu Sans Mono
The DejaVu Sans Mono fonts are based on the Vera fonts and aim to provide a wide range of characters. They are designed to cover the Unicode character set.
The font is specifically meant and designed for programmers facing reading issues, as it provides seamless readability because of the distinguishable characters.
The DejaVu Sans Mono font is free and open-source, bundled and easily integrated with operating systems like Linux.
Besides, the font also supports several mathematical symbols and operators, such as Latin, Greek, Georgian, Armenian, and Cyrillic.
4. Terminus
The Terminus font is one of the best fonts for programmers. It is clean and a fixed-width font for software coders and developers that work long shifts of 8+ hours in front of the computers.
The font is easy to scan, read, and install, not harming your eyes and eliminating straining eye pain. Many young and modern programmers face a lot of difficulties with bitmap fonts. Hence, in such cases, the Terminus font is one of the few fonts programmers swear by.
5. Cascadia Code
The Cascadia Code is a new and fun monospaced font that’s the default for the Windows Terminal and Visual Code.
Cascadia has three primary font variations: Cascadia Code, Cascadia Mono, and Cascadia (Code|Mono) PL. It consists of a default, italic, mon (noo ligatures), cursive font, and additional support for an embedded powerline system.
While the Cascadia Mono variation doesn’t come with ligatures, the Cascadia Code font does. It’s known for its stylistic and functional ligatures. It’s an open-source font and a great one to try and see if it facilitates and makes your programming experience a breeze.
6. JetBrains Mono
JetBrains Mono is a carefully designed and optimized coding font for programmers, making working on and reading a large volume of code a breeze.
It consists of over 140 code ligatures, 145 languages, and 8 weights with italics. It takes care of and efficiently handles elements like the coding letter’s height, width sizes, and point sizes.
It’s open-source, and you can easily use the font for your personal or commercial work, as it is quite clear and comfortable for many coders and programmers.
7. Anonymous Pro
Anonymous Pro is a family of four fixed-width fonts with an international and Unicode-based character set. It supports several Western and Central European Latin-based languages, including Cyrillic and Greek.
There’s also another font version, called Anonymous Pro Minus, that doesn’t consist of embedded bitmaps for smaller sizes, while the Anonymous Pro does.
Anonymous Pro supports four styles: Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic. Besides, it also supports several computer-based symbols and DOS box-drawing characters. The font is free under the Open Font License (OFL).
8. Fira Code
Fira Code is another popular and recommended coding font for programmers because it supports an essential feature—programming ligatures.
Ideally, all the programming and coding fonts should be designed with Unicode symbols and operators; however, that’s not the case yet. The Fira Code font eliminates this issue by being a free monospaced font consisting of common programming multi-character ligatures.
This reduces the time and energy coders require to parse, scan, and join multiple characters into a single code, facilitating reading and understanding the code faster.
9. Consolas
Consolas is a common and well-known font, as it’s a default font for Windows 8 Notepad.
It’s commonly used in programming environments requiring monospaced font, as all the characters have the same width, making it ideal for personal and professional programmers.
It’s a highly readable font in numbers and letters, enabling a comfortable reading experience for programmers working long hours.
10. Source Code Pro
Source Code Pro is Adobe’s modern and monospaced font for developers, falling in the same family as Serif, Sans, and Han variants.
It’s explicitly designed for UI providing a range of weights and comes with a few changes to suit codes, such as dotted zero, optimized symbols, modified ‘i’, ‘j’, and ‘l’, and more.
11. Monoid
Monoid is an open-source coding font that’s clear, crisp, and highly preferable by most programmers and software developers within the industry.
While most software developers are screen-faced and heavy, most of the time, programmers must work in a low-res computing environment with a smaller window screen. This is where Monoid comes into play.
It also offers a Monoid and Font Awesome integration, called Monoisome, that helps you see the icons directly in your code. So, if you need a customizable font with bitmap-like sharpness, even on low-res displays, Monoid is the right programming font to choose.
12. Ubuntu Mono
Ubuntu Mono is a Linux-based font that’s incredibly readable and clear on several screen resolutions. It works best for coding and body text and significantly works best for programmers with headaches and eye-straining issues.
The Ubuntu family supports the complete Cyrillic, Latin, Greek alphabets, and Esperanto, combining a wide variety of punctuation and diacritical marks.
It covers around 200-250 glyphs and 200-250 languages, native to around 3 billion people worldwide.
13. Sudo – Font for Coder
Sudo is a monospaced and hand-made font that provides legible character spacing to improve readability for programmers.
While it doesn’t support ligatures, unlike other reliable fonts, Sudo supports out-of-the-box Powerline status bars and is a highly space-efficient font with a letter width of just 44% of the font size.
Jens Kutilek designed the font in 2009 for Mac and Windows users.
14. Droid Sans Mono
Droid Sans Mono is a coding font that was amongst the first to be included in Google fonts.
It’s specifically designed to improve readability for coders on high-resolution browsers and mobile Steve Matteson designed Droid Sans Mono to offer optimal quality legibility with features like upright stress, neutral appearance, and open forms.
It covers an extensive character set including Western Europe, Cyrillic, Eastern/Central Europe, Turkish, and Greek support.
15. Roboto
Roboto is one of the most common fonts that you don’t just see on programming interfaces but on several other websites and applications.
The font’s characters are clean, unique, and discernable, eliminating eye-straining issues for programmers and making it a highly beneficial font for coders for a better programming experience.
Robot belongs to the Google fonts family and is used by many professional designers and web developers.
16. Press Start 2P
If you want to use a programming font that hits nostalgia and provides a retro feel, Press Start 2P is an ideal font.
It’s a bitmap font based on the 1980s Namco arcade game’s font design. It consists of various non-ASCII Unicode characters for several pan-European languages, including Cyrillic and Greek.
17. MonoLisa
MonoLisa is a programming font designed to boost developers’ and programmers’ productivity and reduce fatigue.
It incorporates unique features and techniques, like increasing the character width, character space, and character distinction to reduce ambiguity and reading flow and more to improve legibility and make it a readable and visually pleasant coding font.
Besides, it has over 120 specially designed coding ligatures and supports more than 200 languages, including Vietnamese, Latin, and Greek.
18. Dina
Dina is a crisp, clear, and cleanly-designed programming font updated from its previous version to become more high-quality and readable.
The original Dina Bitmap font was converted to TTF to improve its readability and remove artifacts to enable more one-on-one close conversations for the main-use text.
It also comes with a bold font version, a 1:1 copy of the original font.
Conclusion
When your job is as strenuous as looking at your computer screen for long hours, trying to code and decode the codes in front of you, choosing a programming font that is easy on your eyes is the least you can do to reduce work fatigue and eye strains.
Whether you’re a programming software, a professional app developer, or an IT employee, make sure you try and check the coding fonts mentioned above to have a seamless and effortless programming experience.
