The Best Programming Font
A topic that never seem to get old is the choice of your programming font. Every now and then major dev and tech blogs review and revisit font choices for programmers. Two weeks ago Jeff Atwood did a recap of good programming fonts. He did a pretty extensive review in 2004 as well. Scott Hanselman is another top blogger who often shares his opinions on choosing a font for Visual Studio. (There are so many posts on Fonts on Scott's site that there's no point in linking to them. Just go to his blog and search for font.)
The above wasn't just an excuse to link to Jeff's blog (which has massive traffic), but because I believe CodingHorror did a disservice to my favorite programming font.
Before getting to that I believe that the choice of programming font is important. We often spend the majority of our day in Visual Studio reading and writing code. If anything can assist to minimize eye fatigue and head-aches it is worth doing. Especially if it is as simple as changing a font. The hard part is of course picking a font.
In order to pick a font, it is not enough to view a few high def screen shots and select the one you think looks the prettiest. You need to spend a few hours (or a few days) using the font while registering how you feel with regards to eye fatigue and general tiredness.
About a year ago I did extensive experimentation using different fonts. I decided to spend at least a day on any font that didn't immediately make me sea-sick.
I'll make a long story short. After trying out Lucida Console, Consolas, Courier New (the default), Monacco, Proggy Clean and others I came across Envy Code R. This is a font produced by Damien Guard and it is excellent. It even supports Italic comments in Visual Studio.
This font has a caveat though, it looks really good only when using 10 point size. This is where Coding Horror missed on the font review. Jeff decided to compare the fonts using 11 points.
In the end, picking a font is really a very individual choice. What works for me doesn't necessarily work for you.
I don't think that Courier New, the default font for Visual Studio, is as bad as many argues, but there are better options available. It's worth it to try out a few different options though.
I wonder how many just stick to the default?