If you are in IT professionally (coding or sysadmin) you will be staring at monospaced fonts for many many hours a day. So it's probably justified to spend 2 minutes picking a very good one. It can make your work (typing ; ) just a little bit more pleasing.

I did some research and the Inconsolata font by Raph Levien is considered one of the best programming fonts by many. I must say it's pretty good on the eyes, but decide for yourself:

You can download it and install it yourself, or:

Install the font on Ubuntu

As suggested by Gekkio in the comments section:

"If you're using Ubuntu 9.04, there's also a packaged version available in the repos which should setup things perfectly:

sudo aptitude install ttf-inconsolata

(Requires universe repos to be enabled)"

Thank you Gekkio!

So just copy-paste that. Your font cache will be refreshed and when you start a new Terminal or IDE, you should be able to select the Inconsolata font.

NetBeans Anyone?

NetBeans didn't seem to support the Inconsolata font but as suggested by Filip Jukić in the comments section:

"It seems that NetBeans doesn't support OTF fonts. You might try converting it to TTF using FontForge, I decided it wasn't worth the hassle."

So I decided to do just that and I now have Inconsolata in My new IDE: NetBeans:

Download the TTF version

If you need the TTF version for NetBeans (or another IDE that doesn't support OTF), download it here.

Install the TTF version (Ubuntu only)

If you have Ubunbtu you can just paste the following in a terminal:

[ "$(whoami)" = "root" ] && {echo "No this time you really can't be root ; )" exit 1}
sudo echo "Installing inconsolata font..."
[ -d "~/.fonts" ] || mkdir "~/.fonts/"
cd ~/.fonts/
wget http://kevin.vanzonneveld.net/docs/install_the_best_coding_font/Inconsolata.ttf
sudo echo "Refreshing cache..."
sudo fc-cache -f -v
sudo echo "Done."

Question

What is your favorite coding / sysadmin font?

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tags: ubuntu, programming, sysadmin, desktop, ide, font, terminal, monospaced, incolsolata
category: Programming
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Comments

#31. Kevin on 12 August 2010

Thanks for your wonderful feedback everyone!

#30. Javi on 29 July 2010

For me Dina font is the best.
http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Jibz/Dina/

#29. Mecki on 19 July 2010

Inconsolate could be a nice font, but it has some hinting issues: At 11 pt it is almost too small to read on large monitors, using 12 pt the upper line of the equals sign (=) is unclear, same when using 13 pt and at 14 pt both lines are finally very blurry. Even at 18 the upper one is unclear. They are both crisp only at 19 pt, a little bit too big for my taste :-P Further opening squared brace is always a bit less sharp than closing squared brace. It's the opposite around for curly ones.

#28. Robert Peters on 22 June 2010

Thanks for the short, simple, and highly informative post, my eyeballs thank you mightily :)

#27. chrelad on 16 June 2010

Thanks for posting this, the more people that post these great fonts, the easier it is for people like me to find 'em :D

#26. Luis Landgrave on 13 April 2010

Thanks for the TTF conversion!

#25. bluepicaso on 22 March 2010

I have question for pietra.
Actually i did a small thing

XP: Control Panel > Display > Appearance > Effects: "Use the following method to smooth
edges of screen fonts" Set to clear type
... [more]
Though all the fonts look good but fonts in komodo edit are just not good on eyes. Could you please help?

#24. bluepicaso on 22 March 2010

Thanx a lot

#23. pietra on 19 March 2010

thanks for sharing this. on komodo IDE it looks easy on the eyes.

cheers!

#22. Niroshan on 18 March 2010

Thanks a lot for the ttf version. I was looking for a ttf version of Inconsolata coz i wanted a good monospace font for printing my output.

#21. Kevin on 10 June 2009

@ Alex Weber: Seems to me that you may have created that directory as root once, and now you only have read rights.

Also seems to me that you should own everything inside your homedir so I think you could:

sudo chown -R alex.alex ~alex/.fonts

And be done with it ; )

#20. Alex Weber on 08 June 2009

@ Kevin, yeah it makes no sense to me to have to sudo wget but at least on my setup I need to sudo copy the fonts to ~/.fonts (been installing more fonts lately...) and I get permission denied any other way...

Cheers!

#19. Meshach on 05 June 2009

Just kidding.

Mine would probably be Monaco.

#18. Meshach on 04 June 2009

My fav coding font is Impact.

#17. Kevin on 04 June 2009

@ Alex Weber: Damn we are fast : )

Doesn't really make sense to me why you should have to sudo for a wget though.

#16. Kevin on 04 June 2009

@ Alex Weber: Thanks. Using Jaunty myself. Did you get any errors?
Sometimes sudo asking for a password prevents further execution. Maybe you could try again and let me know?

#15. Alex Weber on 04 June 2009

Figured it out... you need to sudo wget for it to work, at least I had to... :)

My bad for the double post!

#14. Alex Weber on 04 June 2009

Thanks for the tip and the article but I couldn't get your script to work on Ubuntu Jaunty...

My favorite font apart from Inconsolata is Vera Sans btw! :)

#13. Kevin on 27 May 2009

Thanks for sharing everyone!

@ sweetl80: If I remember correctly Inconsolata was actually based on Consolas, but I'm not entirely sure : )

#12. Chris on 27 May 2009

I usually use Courier New, but I will be switching to Linux, Ubuntu 9.04 distribution next month (I've tried several times but it had little annoyances - from what I see these have been fixed now), so I'll give this a try first, it does look nice.

#11. sweetl80 on 27 May 2009

my favourite is consolas... cleartype, and done really nicely. there is no possiblity of getting letters confused.

will try this tho, it looks really nice.

#10. Brian C. Ladd on 26 May 2009

I love Inconsolata. I find that I can use it at smaller optical point sizes so I can see more lines at a time (and proportionally more text across, as well).

My only disappointment is that there is no bold variant so printing highlighted code does not work (I am finishing up a programming manuscript and I need to be able to highlight Java code on the static page). Heck, I'd be willing to pay money for the bold versions.

-bcl

#9. Kevin on 26 May 2009

@ Filip Jukić & Pieter: Thanks. I've converted the .otf to .ttf with FontForge and got it to work with NetBeans. I've made it available here & updated the article.

#8. Pieter on 26 May 2009

Sometimes to get a TTF font to appear Netbeans (or Eclipse, or IntelliJ, or any other Java based ide / program), it must be installed for the JRE used to run the IDE. Once you know which JRE it is (bundled or separate JDK), copy the TTF files into the /jre/lib/fonts directory and restart the IDE).

Haven't tried it with .otf though.

#7. Kevin on 26 May 2009

m.milicevic & Priit: Thanks for sharing, I will definitely look into it!

@ Gekkio: Didn't even check apt for the font, this is awesome! I've updated the article accordingly, thx!

@ Filip Jukić: OK that explains a lot : ) Let me see how hard that is & maybe share the result here.

#6. Filip Jukić on 26 May 2009

It seems that NetBeans doesn't support OTF fonts. You might try converting it to TTF using FontForge, I decided it wasn't worth the hassle.

#5. Gekkio on 26 May 2009

If you're using Ubuntu 9.04, there's also a packaged version available in the repos which should setup things perfectly:

sudo apt-get install ttf-inconsolata

(Requires universe repos to be enabled)

#4. Jake Boxer on 26 May 2009

Using a nice-looking programming font makes more of a difference than I ever could've imagined. Programming in Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (my favorite), Inconsolata, Consolas, and even Monaco is just so much more enjoyable for me than using Courier.

I really can't explain it; it just feels better to look at my code in a nice font.

#3. Priit on 26 May 2009

I've found Terminus most pleasing to the eye.

#2. m.milicevic on 25 May 2009

BTW, recently I did change DPI settings on Ubuntu (144 DPI from default 96),and font looks much nicer right now. If you need DPI calculation, check:
@see: http://www.raydreams.com/docs/dpi.html

#1. m.milicevic on 25 May 2009

Hi Kevin,
it's all personal of course, but I like Envy R much better: http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-coding-font-released

It is also free.
Few years ago I bought Pragmata font (which is right now way to expensive) and Envy R is a lookalike of Pragmata...I found Inconsolata to "square-ish"