Proportional Programming Fonts

Posted on January 30, 2013
Filed Under BBEdit, Fonts, XCode | 9 Comments

Think PascalWay back in the day, when I first really got into real Mac programming I used an old IDE called Think Pascal. One of the cool things about it was that unlike Think C, it allowed programming with proportional fonts. I typically used Geneva to code in Pascal and Monoco to program in C. I later switched to doing almost all my coding in Visual Studio which didn’t work well with proportional fonts. When I used Xcode I typically just used the default font. Later, especially when doing Python programming in TextMate or BBedit I used some of the newer monospaced fonts like Microsoft’s Consolas, Inconsolata or Andale Mono. Since then other fonts have come out like Adobe’s Source Code Pro, Anonymous Pro.

Over on ADN I was discussing old proportional fonts and someone mentioned to me that Xcode actually works with proportional fonts. He loved to use Verdana to code with. Both Verdana and Lucida Grande work quite nice. However they have a big problem in that the zero and O aren’t easy to distinguish at a gland. likewise a lower case L and an I look basically the same. I started playing around with quite a few fonts and discovered that Google had actually made a collection of programming fonts you can download. Several are serif fonts and I find most serif fonts are hard to code with. (Nightmares of having to code with Courier a few times) The only one of Google’s fonts I liked was Trim. But it is quite nice.

Surprising, since I have that bias against serif fonts for programming, Georgia actually is very easy to read code in. Sadly the zero doesn’t have a dot or cross through it and is about the same size and shape as the lower case O. Still that’s what I’m using right now.

Ideally there would be a free or at least cheap font editor so I could make a minor change like copy Inconsolata’s zero and paste it into a custom Georgia or Verdana. I tried Font Forge via MacPorts but I could never get the fonts it produced to get imported correctly by OSX.

Related posts:

  1. Fonts on iOS
  2. Fonts We Actually Want
  3. Lightspeed C and Pascal
  4. Serif Font Legibility
  5. Programming the iPad
  6. Compositional Programming
  7. Some Useful WP Plugins
  8. Polyglot Programming

Comments

9 Responses to “Proportional Programming Fonts”

Visual Studio allows any font in the code editor. What’s wrong with it ?

Indeed. I used Arial in Visual Studio quite happily for many years, though I have recently switched to Source Code Pro.

3 David Fredericks on February 1st, 2013 7:10 pm

I’ve been using Verdana 10 in Visual Studio for years. Saves space and is more readable than similar sized fixed pitch fonts.

The older version of VS would have odd quirks when you used proportional fonts. The newer versions don’t have those problems although rectangular selection can work oddly at times.

For those with limited vision, Georgia works quite well in Visual Studio.

I’ve been using Georgia since I wrote that post for all my Python and I have to say I really like it. Inconsolata and Menlo were both good. But I’m actually surprisingly happy with Georgia.

[...] mentioned last week my move to using proportional programming fonts when I found out they worked with Xcode. I actually [...]

I decided to give proportional fonts a go last year. I blogged about it at the link below, but I found that the font Trebuchet MS is pretty good in Visual Studio. It’s sans-serif and has distinct characters for I-i-l-1, (-[-{, and o-O-0.

http://www.yakkowarner.com/2012/05/i-code-with-catapult.html

“…a big problem in that the zero and O aren’t easy to distinguish at a gland.” – See, there’s your problem. Use your eyes, not your glands, to distinguish one character from another. :-)

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