Programming Fonts – Nine Fonts Compared

Introduction

The best programming font I have come across so far is Terminus. I use it for everything except printed documents.

Unfortunately, there are at least the following shortcomings of Terminus:

Characters 0 and 8 are hard to distinguish. It does not annoy me much in practice, but a better font might solve this :)
As Terminus is a bitmap font, some programs do not want to display it. There is a Terminus TTF version, but it lacks the clarity of the proper bitmap Terminus unless you happen to hit exactly the right font size and have all the modern things (hinting, antialiasing, etc.) turned off!

Hence, from time to time, there is need for some TTF/vector font instead. Given that there are tons of other programming fonts it should not be hard to find a proper substitute except it seems incredibly hard to get the details right. Maybe I am just too much used to Terminus.

The screenshots on this page were created using theme Night, font size 16 and the C code from https://github.com/m7a/bo-z80-ti84plus-trtotp/blob/master/trtotp.c on the following page: https://www.programmingfonts.org. The exception is Monoid which has been tested at font size 15 because 16 was very wide.

Disclaimer: I collected the fonts I liked most here, but your preferences might be different. I suggest browsing https://www.programmingfonts.org and trying it with some code of yours and a theme that looks similar to the one you are normally using.

The following table compiles a list of fonts that look OK. None can beat Terminus so far, but some come pretty close and might be chosen if at any future time, venerable bitmap fonts are banned from ever more modern applications and displays.

Font Samples


ConsolaMono	Fairfax HD	Fifteen

Monoid	mononoki	Iosevka

PT Mono	Share Tech Mono	Terminus (bitmap version!)

Note that you do not get the bitmap Terminus on https://www.programmingfonts.org by default. I downloaded a HTML variant of the page and edited it by hand to replace the (vector-based) web font with the system-installed one to make the comparison screenshot.

Metadata

OFL := SIL Open Font License, Other := See linked homepage

Name	License	Homepage
ConsolaMono	OFL	https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/consolamono
Fairfax HD	OFL	http://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/fairfaxhd.shtml
Fifteen	OFL	https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/fifteen
Monoid	OFL/Expat	https://larsenwork.com/monoid/
mononoki	OFL	https://github.com/madmalik/mononoki
Iosevka	OFL	https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
PT Mono	Other	https://company.paratype.com/pt-sans-pt-serif
Share Tech Mono	OFL	https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Share+Tech+Mono
Terminus	OFL	http://http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/

A subset of the fonts is available in Debian:

Name	Debian Package
Monoid	fonts-monoid
mononoki	fonts-mononoki
Terminus	xfonts-terminus
PT Mono	texlife-fonts-extra

Discussion

So far, I like the following ones best:

Terminus
Mononoki
Fairfax HD

Here are my main criteria for distinguishing the good ones from the better ones:

Clarity in display (Terminus wins by far margin)
Uniformity of characters vs. distingiuishability. I have found that many programming fonts try to over-accentuate certain characters such that they can be distinguished more easily. On the downside, this causes the text to look a little “disturbed” which is just as annoying. I find this can best be evaluated by looking at the number blocks (check the PASSWORDPADDINGBYTES array contents from the screenshots): All of the fonts displayed here are OK in this regard, but Termins wins again.

Some Non-Terminus Favorites at Random Dates

2021-10-10	Share Tech Mono
2022-01-12	PT Mono (for practical reasons, see below)

Fonts and UTF-8-Art

This section was added 2022-01-12.

╔════════╗
║ TEST   ║
╟────────╢
║ BOX    ║
╚════════╝

Mononoki, Monoid, Share Tech Mono, Consola Mono and Fifteen fail to display test box correctly by displaying the middle line from the box in a different length compared to the other characters (maybe they are missing the glyph?).
Fairfax HD displays it correctly but with large vertical distances between the lines. This can be tuned with CSS line-height property to nice results.
PT Mono, Iosevka and Terminus display it all-correctly.

=> From an ASCII-art-compatibility point of view one should select one of Fairfax HD, PT Mono, Iosevka or Terminus.

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