VSCode is a relatively new text editor developed by Microsoft. While the text editor is still in its early stages of life, it has managed to capture a place in the hearts of developers around the world. The productivity boost that it brings with itself is incredible and has been as praised as Sublime Text. It’s just as easy as you can imagine, haven’t you ever heard about the best programming fonts? In this post, I have collected the best programming fonts for your beloved VSCode.
I found the best programming font for programmers. There are many posts and sites comparing fonts for programmers, but they are all amazing articles. This is why I repeated the same subject here. Since I always found myself lost in dozens of fonts and could not figure out which one was best for me. So today I tried many fonts and picked up the following 10 of them for you.
Visual Studio Code is a cross-platform source code editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. This guide provides information on the best font choice for programming using Visual Studio Code, fonts to choose from, recommended font families, and more.
There are many posts and sites comparing fonts for programming and they are all amazing articles. And we picked up the following fonts for you.
Cascadia Code
The Cascadia Code font is an open-source font developed to improve the readability of program text in plain-text editors such as in the Windows Terminal, Microsoft Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code.
👉 GitHub – Microsoft/Cascadia-code: This is a fun, new monospaced font that includes programming ligatures and is designed to enhance the modern look and feel of the Windows Terminal.
MonoLisa — font follows function
MonoLisa features a few unique techniques that increase the legibility and make it visually pleasing to look at for longer periods of time.
This is my personal favorite font to use for programming. I found this font in early 2020 and used it on CodePen for a while before purchasing a license so I could use it locally in VSCode and also on my personal website.
Is it pricey? Yes. But I believe the subtle differences in this typeface make the viewing experience substantially better.
Input
Input is a programming font that was designed from the ground up to make software developers’ lives easier. The site itself says that not only the characters but also the “punctuation were designed to be large and clear in the context of code.” Going a step further than simply a monospaced font (where every character takes up the same amount of horizontal space), there is a proportionally-spaced, sans-serif version that is designed for coders to be able to avoid any kind of character overlap or oddities in character sizing. Input is a programmer’s font if there ever was one, and you’d be doing yourself a favor by checking it out.
JetBrains Mono — a typeface for developers
JetBrains has a whole suite of code editors for developers and they also have their own monospace font. JetBrains Mono stands out from a lot of other typefaces due to its increased height and code-specific ligatures.
Before I bought MonoLisa, I was using JetBrains Mono. It’s simple and beautiful. And free!
Fira Code
Recommended by tons of programmers because of its inclusion of coding ligatures, Fira Code is good stuff. Fira Code is an offshoot of the Fira Mono font. It’s developed by Mozilla, so you know that it has to be well-made and worth using. Programmers use an absolute mess of symbols and characters that aren’t necessarily letters and numbers, and Fira Code autocorrects them into equal ligatures so that you no longer have to discern ASCII strings, but instead see the standard symbol. It is a monospaced code, and it’s just beautiful in any editor, but if you want to talk about reducing eyestrain, not having to interpret characters’ meanings as often will certainly do it.
Consolas
Microsoft got into the programming fonts game with Consolas. Included in all Windows installations, Consolas is a monospaced font that MS developed to be clean, easy on the eyes, and multi-purpose. The MS documentation for Consolas puts it better than we can:
All characters have the same width, like old typewriters, making it a good choice for personal and business correspondence. The improved Windows font display allowed a design with proportions closer to normal text than traditional monospaced fonts like Courier. This allows for more comfortably reading of extended text on screen. OpenType features include hanging or lining numerals; slashed, dotted and normal zeros; and alternative shapes for a number of lowercase letters. The look of text can be tuned to personal taste by varying the number of bars and waves.
Source Code Pro
Source Code Pro is an open-source typeface that was released by Adobe in 2012 and has over 17k stars on GitHub.
It became extremely popular in the developer community and can be downloaded for free!
Available through Google Fonts, Source Code Pro is a nice monospaced font that coders turn to pretty often. The medium variation (the fourth one down in the image above) is highly recommended because, well, it’s average in terms of thickness, which makes it incredibly easy to read. If the name wasn’t enough of an indication, this particular font family was designed with programmers in mind, so it being one of the best programming fonts around should hardly come as a surprise to anyone.
Monoid
Crisp, clear, and just about perfect, Monoid is a programmer’s dream. While most developers are screen-laden these days, the fact of the matter is that there will be times that you have to work in a low-res environment or with a smaller-than-ideal window. Monoid’s got you covered. There’s even a Monoid and Font Awesome integration called Monoisome. That’s kind of neat. Additionally, if you want to know more about what it’s like to work on a font that’s designed specifically for coding, the creator writes a lot about it on Medium.
Droid Sans Mono — an open-source sans-serif font
Droid Sans Mono is a typeface released by Steve Matteson for the Android ecosystem.
A lot of developers love this font, but distinguishing between O and 0 becomes difficult because the typeface doesn’t have a slashed zero or dotted zero.
Thankfully, GitHub user AlbertoDorado altered the font and released a version with dotted and slashed zeros.
Ubuntu Mono
No list of the best programming fonts would be complete without having a Linux system font on the list. Ubuntu Mono is a workhorse of a font that is both incredibly readable, clear and crisp on various resolutions, and honestly, just looks really cool. It works well for body text as well as coding, and staring and it day after day won’t result in eyestrain or headaches. At least, not in our experience. Plus, if you just love Ubuntu but have to work in MacOS or Windows, this gives you a little taste of home.
Sudo
Sudo looks a lot like Ubuntu Mono, only a little more squashed. In fact, though, it’s a hand-made font that Jens KutĂlek put together because they wanted a better programming font. In almost every way, Sudo succeeds as a programming font. Even though the spacing is more compact than some font families, the characters are still perfectly legible because it’s still a monospaced font. The numbers and letters are different heights for easier differentiation, too, which is incredibly useful for at-a-glance debugging.
Roboto
We know what you’re thinking. Roboto? Isn’t that the over-used web font? To which we answer, yep! In fact, that’s precisely the reason it’s one of the best programming languages. The reason you see Roboto on so many websites these days is the same reason you are looking for the best programming font. It doesn’t cause eyestrain to look at for long periods of time, and the characters are discernable and unique so that you don’t have to worry about spending that extra time making out what something says. Just because it’s used for web content doesn’t mean it can’t be used for making the web itself.
Conclusion:
Developers always want to make programming easier and more comfortable. One of the most important tools that we need is a good editor, and if you ask me, Visual Studio Code is the best tool for web development and coding. I use VSCode for many years and I’m enjoying it very much especially now with those user interface improvements.
Every programmer chooses different font. Somehow, it can even affect his mood and productivity. Some like always to use fixed-width font while others want to be able to vary the font size. And others still prefer using variable-width fonts. There is a bunch of different programming fonts and it’s hard to choose what is the best one for you and your project.