Fri, 16 Oct 2009
Terminal Font
Today I have read an announcement of the Anonymous Pro font, which should be optimized for text terminals and for the programming environment. As this clearly matches my use case, I have decided to try it.
I was soooo disappointed. I may be too used to the font I use (Lucida Typewriter, the upper part of the image), but I think Anonymous Pro is clearly worse.
Which terminal font do you use? And how does it compare to Anonymous Pro or some other fonts?
12 replies for this story:
scrool wrote: Inconsolata
Couple weeks ago I've started to use Inconsolata (http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html). It is somewhat similar to MS Consolas which doesn't look on *nix systems (Cleartype). Inconsolata is optimized for use with antialiasing enabled otherwise it looks quite ugly. IMHO it is quite usable for sizes from 12px to 9px. Btw. take a look at Top 10 Programming Fonts @ Hivelogic (http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts) maybe there is font that will suits you better than Lucida or Anonymous.
adam wrote:
why do you have to try anything else when you already use LucidaTypewriter? :) it works great and its unicode set is quite good
qubit wrote: Envy Code R
I use Envy Code R for terminal (bold style) and programming. Give it a try ...
Milan Zamazal wrote:
I use DejaVu Sans Mono. Before Emacs could handle antialiased fonts, I had used Terminus fonts. Terminus fonts are great among bitmap fonts (best of anything I've ever seen) as long as one of their sizes fits your environment. Of course, antialised fonts are clearly better than any bitmap font.
Yenya wrote:
As far as I can see, Terminus is extremely ugly (e.g. diagonal lines of a different width than horizontal or vertical ones. I know it is for some reason popular amongst emacs users, but I fail to see the reason. From the mentioned fonts and from the http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts page I have tried Inconsolata (unreadable at 9pt bold) and Envy Code R (close enough, but the vertically maximized terminal at 9pt has only ~78 rows on my screen, and its boldface "m" looks relatively ugly, while with LucidaTypewriter I have 87 rows and both "w" and "m" look good even in boldface 9pt).
exa wrote:
you should get some antialiasing, it looks way better with it.
Milan Zamazal wrote:
Yenya, I've always wondered how LucidaTypewriter can be your favorite font. It looked very unpleasantly "hairy" to me on any screen I tried. See http://www.zamazal.org/tmp/ltw.png and http://www.zamazal.org/tmp/terminus.png. Is it the same what you can see on your screen (it's 17px size, no specific resolution settings)? If so then indeed it must be just some difference between vi and Emacs brains. ;-)
Yenya wrote: Re: Milan Zamazal
You are right, on your screenshots, Terminus looks better (i.e. the lines are smoother). Maybe you force a 100dpi (or 75dpi) bitmap font to some different resolution? Compare it to the upper part of the screenshot above, and note how Terminus has _huge_ spaces both between the letters and between the rows. As for me, terminus resembles those ugly buit-in VGA fonts.
Yenya wrote: Re: exa
I have antialiasing on (full, LCD-subpixel, RGB ordering), but I guess I will not get any with a bitmap font (and as you can see, even with a scalable Anonymous Pro it does not help when the basic dimensions of the font are not good.
matejcik wrote:
my favourite programming font ever is Schumacher Clean (sometimes only "Clean"). it is bitmap with only one fixed size which suits me perfectly. and it's part of xorg's "misc" font set.
krejvl wrote:
I use the "default X Window" Misc Fixed font. To be precise -misc-fixed-medium-r-*-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-2. However, in my opinion, the look depends on your backround color, screen type and size etc.
Pathconf wrote:
I don't have any favourite font, but currently I'm using Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, it neither too wide nor too narrow.