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There are a lot of code fonts on HN today. Rather than make a new post I will talk about some of my favorite that are a little less common. None of these are free I don't think.
Cartograph CF - The one I've been using for code for years. Very readable, almost "comic mono"-like choices of some of the lower case glyphs but in a good way. All the character is in the italic which you will either love or hate.
Quadraat sans mono - The entire quadraat family is a collection of masterpieces imo, but are generally too distinctive to be appropriate for most public-facing work. But it's your computer so who cares. I use the mono sans one for my terminal. The lowercase f seems so out of place there but you learn to love it.
Alegreya sans - Not a mono font, but it almost is so if you've ever flirted with proportional fonts for code this is a fun one to try. There is a lot of careful line width variation that gives a lot of the appearance and readability advantages of serifs but keeps most of the visual coherence of sans.
I like all of these because they look feel more like normal fonts rather than code fonts. They have careful variation that adds character and improves readability for me. I've switched to an almost-no-color code theme that uses font weight instead, and the details like this become more important that way.
And then only kind of related but if you want to use unusual fonts in your terminal but you have a complex prompt setup, install font forge and learn to use something like https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/blob/master/font-pat... to patch in the extra characters. This can also solve your "I love this font but want a dotted zero" type problems as well. Small skill investment for a small return over a long period of time. You'll always be using fonts.
Me too. The only con is that Monaco does not have bold variants.
Fortunately, someone has created them!
https://github.com/vjpr/monaco-bold
Nothing beats Iosevka (https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka) for me. It's narrow yet super readable, making great use of screen real estate. Lots of customization, ligatures, weights, and a nerd font patch for terminal.
Doesn't that depend on the font author providing a NL version?
e.g if I wanted the FiraCode improvements[1] over FiraMono without the ligatures and my editor doesn't support disabling them I basically have to build it myself.
[1] https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode#whats-in-the-box