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Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

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AceJohnny2

Everyone plugging their favorite font, but here's an easy way to compare them side-by-side to help you choose:

https://www.codingfont.com

(featured on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29010443)

Also this site to view a wide collection of programming fonts: https://www.programmingfonts.org

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The problem with codingfont.com is that it overrides the line height, so you won't see what the line height will actually look like in your editor, which is something that I care about.

If your editor doesn't allow you to override the font's default line height (to whatever you like), there's a nice little tool you can use to do this to the font file itself: https://github.com/source-foundry/font-line

This is also useful for mixing and matching fonts. Nicolas Rougier uses this in NANO Emacs to hack the Victor Mono italic to have the same line height as Roboto Mono.

I think the point is that their editor does, but the website above for previewing doesn't. If you have to download and and edit the font file manually to get the website to preview it, you might as well just preview it in the editor instead.

Also, because people tend to be nitpicky about particular font features, such as:

- g with a curve or loop at the bottom?

- 0s barred, dotted or gasp nothing?

- $ with full-length bar or just top/bottom pins?

- etc

There are some fonts families out there that let you select just the right set for you, for example Input: https://input.djr.com/info/

I've been using the variable width Input for a while now and I've been really enjoying it. Main downside is poor APL coverage.

Another good comparison site:

https://devfonts.gafi.dev

Thanks for the send. I'm new to choosing a font for my editors, and just went through the tournament. I've got to say, Inconsolata is quite a finessed font for coding. It definitely seems to work well for me.

I do wish that site let you "exclude" certain options so they never appear in the tournament at all. It would have saved time, one or two are so awful they aren't work doing comparisons on.

https://www.codingfont.com doesn't have 3270 (https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font), but programmingfonts does: https://www.programmingfonts.org/#font3270

It even includes Anka/Coder, my personal favorite. It doesn't include anything but Regular, not its variants like Narrow, but still quite a complete project.

Playing the font tournament is fun, especially with the font names turned off. I ended up with Fira Code (my current preference) vs Fira Mono in the final round.

Thanks for the codingfont.com

https://imgur.com/a/n6cKfRT

i love the tournament idea!

i downloaded my winner, installed it, changed my editor... and immediately went back to Monaco :) there's a lot of cognitive momentum to overcome in switching fonts.

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