Time for another of my favorite programming fonts: Inconsolata.

Inconsolata specimen from fontsquirrel.com.

As its creator states, it bears a resemblance to the Consolas font that ships with more recent Windows versions, and which isn’t all that bad either. This one has a bit of an edge in my opinion: it’s freely available so I’m good to go on my Mac with it.

It’s a bit sharper and bolder than Droid Sans Mono, and the letters are a bit more spaced out. So, based on your mood, I could see using either one. For some reason it also reminds me warmly of the monospaced font Sun would use in their old Java books in the 90’s – probably Vera Sans Mono.

I have to admit that I like fonts. I’m one of those oddballs who knows about serifs and x-heights and descenders and kerning and autoligatures and all those sorts of things. I’ve never designed my own font, but I know what I like, and since I spent a lot of time coding and staring at terminals, I definitely know what I like to use for those purposes. Over the years I’ve had different font preferences, and I’d like to periodically post about some that I like now or used to like.

The first one on my list is what I use for my iTerm2 window: Droid Sans Mono.

Droid Sans Mono specimen from fontsquirrel.com.

It doesn’t have as many sharp corners as other popular monospaced fonts, and the letter spacing is also much bigger, which helps keep commands from running together at the prompt. The lowercase letters are nice and big compared to the capital letters (that is, the font has a nice, big x-height), which makes for easier reading at smaller sizes (which I avoid anyway, my vision is bad enough already.)