My Favorite Programming Fonts for Visual Studio Development

I spend almost 6 hours everyday, working on Visual Studio. That makes me experiment with the type, color and size of the fonts I use in my IDE, to make my development environment look hot and fresh! Here’s a list of my favorite programming fonts. Please note that this list is just my personal preference.

Consolas

Consolas is a great font for Visual Studio development, designed by Luc(as) de Groot, for Microsoft’s ClearType font family. Consolas has proportions closer to normal text, which makes it more reader-friendly than many other monospaced fonts. I have a big LCD screen and I just love the way this font looks on it. Although it is a commercial font, it is bundled with Visual Studio. If you do not have the Consolas font on your machine, you can download the entire pack over here.

Note: You may also want to look at Inconsolata which is a free monospaced font inspired by the Consolas font and designed by Raph Levien.

Here’s how a Consolas 11 point looks

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DejaVu Sans

I am a huge fan of the DejaVu font family. Although the font looks similar to Consolas, I like the taller rounder characters and the extra whitespace (compared to Consolas) in this font. This font looks great when I am working on a dark background theme. You can download the font here (Just double click on the DejaVuSansMono.ttf file to install it and restart Visual Studio)

Here’s how a DejaVu Sans Mono 11 point looks

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Monaco

Monaco is the monospace font on the Mac. I like this font because its neat, has good amount of space between each line and the way it represents a 0 (zero) with a slash. I call it the ‘programmer’s font for designers’. You can download the font here.

Here’s how a Monaco 10 point looks

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Lucida Console

Lucida Console is a variant of Lucida Sans Typewriter with smaller line spacing. To be honest, I do not have any specific reason for using this font. I just like it.

Here’s how a Lucida Console 11 point looks

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Proggy

Proggy is a set of fixed-width screen fonts that are distributed in Microsoft's .fon format, the truetype (ttf) format, as well as XWindows. The font works fine on a Mac too. I particularly favor the Proggy Clean (Slashed Zero). You can download it here (ProggyCleanSZ.ttf)

Here’s a how a Proggy Clean (Slashed Zero) 11 point looks

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Courier New

I often use this font when I am working with my old desktop/laptops with non LCD display. Although this font may not be as attractive as the others listed in this post, I still prefer this font, since I have been using it for a long time. You may also want to look at AnonymousPro which is a modern serif font designed for LCD displays and scales well on high-res.

Here’s how a Courier New 11 point looks

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Well that was a list of my favorite programming fonts for Visual Studio. You may also want to look at a good article at CodeProject.com that lists 42 best monospaced fonts.

Feel free to share your favorite programming font using the comments section and happy coding!






About The Author

Suprotim Agarwal
Suprotim Agarwal, Developer Technologies MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) is the founder and contributor for DevCurry, DotNetCurry and SQLServerCurry. He is the Chief Editor of a Developer Magazine called DNC Magazine. He has also authored two Books - 51 Recipes using jQuery with ASP.NET Controls. and The Absolutely Awesome jQuery CookBook.

Follow him on twitter @suprotimagarwal.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

What about Envy Code R? It's awesome.

http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-coding-font-released

creaothceann said...

I program with Fixedsys Excelsior. Background color #0000A0 (how can you stand a white background?), font color #FFFF00, symbols (operators, braces etc.) #FFFFFF, comments #00FFFF.

Anonymous said...

Add 1 to the list of advocates for Envy - Check out the faculty of the mind theme:

http://iridescence.no/post/The-Official-Faculty-of-The-Mind-Visual-Studio-Theme.aspx

Anonymous said...

Look at DroidSansMono - http://damieng.com/blog/2007/11/14/droid-sans-mono-great-coding-font

Anonymous said...

lol ... white editor background. you are not a serious coder

Anonymous said...

i'm a fan of profont myself:
http://www.tobias-jung.de/seekingprofont/

Anonymous said...

I really like Meiryo UI, except that backslashes are displayed as the yen symbol. If someone would fix that, it would make my day.

Jonathan said...

I use ProFontWindows (even on a Mac)

navsingh said...

i like visual studio 2010,the gui is amazing

Anonymous said...

@Anonymous
Why the hate for white backgrounds?
I've been a 40+ hr/week coder for 15 years now, and I use a white background!
I've tried light/dark versus dark/light, and for ME, I can see better/longer on white.
YMMV but don't say we're not leet haxors if we dont use black...

Ken said...

For those who don't like anti-aliased fonts/ClearType, I'll put a word in for Andale Mono (info on wikipedia, download from sourceforge), formerly part of Microsoft's Core Fonts for the Web package.

I also prefer a lighter background to a darker one (for some reason, it's easier on my eyes). However, I tone down the pure white background (255,255,255) to an ivory color, reducing some of the harshness of the blue (255,255,243).

Anonymous said...

You forgot MsMail3.
Maybe not as beautiful as your fonts, but very efficient.

http://ssevrin.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/font-speciale-developpeurs/

Anonymous said...

You forgot the marvellous PragmataPro. I've never seem a better monospaced font.

Inoace said...

I second PragmataPro. I love it.
Consolas will also work if you want to save money for a font, but keep in mind how many hours you look at the typeface every day.

Alan B said...

Oh so you're not a serious coder now if you use a white background? Is this based on any evidence or just the usual coder received wisdom because all the cool programmer guys are saying it on some stupid forum?

Jeeezis. I wish I was l33t enough not to use a white background.