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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

I've been using DejaVu Sans Mono for quite some time. It's a nice font. It used to be the default monospace font in KDE, until they switched to Noto Mono. Autohinting setting for fontconfig makes it look better for me:

    <!-- Making DejaVu Sans Mono more slim -->
    <match target="font">
      <test name="family">
        <string>DejaVu Sans Mono</string>
      </test>
      <edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
        <bool>true</bool>
      </edit>
    </match>

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I'm in the same boat, every time one of these threads pop up I try a few different fonts recommended here but I always end up going back to DejaVu. It think it looks pretty good, it has good Unicode coverage, it's supported out of the box on most distros...

It's weird because I can be pretty snobbish and opinionated with a lot of programming-related stuff (I use a very expensive keyboard, a large 4k screen, a heavily customized editor and window manager etc...) but when it comes to fonts I really have a hard time finding a real improvement with some of the very expensive fonts people are recommending in this thread compared to good old DevaVu.

I would be very interested to read an article that would explain in details what makes certain fonts better or worse than others, especially for programming.

I switched from using devavu for years finally to iosevka

Had a look at iosevka - it definitely seems nicer than many of the others, but it still feels too vertical when compared to DejaVu in my opinion. Is there something that sold you on it?

I've also switched to iosevka after many years of dejavu sans mono. I really like the brackets of iosevka, and its italics. I also appreciate the customisability of it, and the fact that the font itself is in some ways built rather like Computer Modern via METAFONT (and that it uses a Lisp-like language to do so).

Well, it certainly is more vertical. The increased x-height allows it to be readable at small sizes (and fit more horizontally) which looks great in the terminal and editor, but maybe a bit odd on the test page.

Well, a week later and I think I'm a convert. I didn't like the look at first, but after using it in my IDE and actually typing with it, it's quite nice.

Thanks.

Same here. I always check out some new fonts when a conversation like this appears on HN, but in the end I never found real improvements. I did, however, start testing Ubuntu Mono the last time I compared fonts. Ubuntu Mono is pleasant to look at, like DejaVu, but it takes much less horizontal space, which helps a lot with dual side-to-side text editors.

Personally, I also happen to really like the weird round corner shapes of the lowercase "u", "n", "p", "q", etc in Ubuntu Mono. It's both friendly and interesting but not out of place. But I know opinions can vary greatly.

Conversely I like almost everything about Fira Code, except the weird serif-ed lowercase "r" looks so out of place to me it kind of spoils the entire thing.

But then again I think if I tried Fira for a week or two, I'd stop noticing and no longer care. It's so very subjective.

Yeah, I've gone through several of these programming fonts but something feels nicer about DejaVu Sans Mono, perhaps it's the visual smoothness compared to say Anonymous Pro - I wind up installing it on Windows machines even.

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