Finally, a decent editing font

I’ve been struggling, since my switch to OS X, to find a decent bitmap small font that is very readable and aliased for OS X.

Today I found ProFont, which is perfect in Eclipse if you set OS X to alias fonts <=10pt.

I’ve also found Anonymous, which is great if you don’t want to turn of anti-aliasing at smaller sizes, it looks great at 11pt.

Anyone else know a good font for OS X coders?

January 30th, 2007 by gabriel in Mac, FDT, Eclipse

14 Comments so far

  1. Simon Heys / January 30th, 2007 9:46 am

    SWEET. I’ve actually avoided using Eclipse because I hate the anti-aliasing on the fonts - this is a GREAT FIND.

    Nice that it’s based on Monaco which is what I use in BBEdit. There is no better font, I’ve tried others over the years. I think Apple changed Monaco a lot during the OS9 days; I’m sure at one point it had horizontal bars on the capital I and lowercase l.

    I can never understand all those PC users that user Courier. Ugh.

  2. pixelbreaker / January 30th, 2007 10:32 am

    Morning Si,

    For PC users, it should be mandatory to use ProggyFonts

  3. Chad / January 30th, 2007 2:07 pm

    Great tip. Anonymous seems to be a great font. I actually just use Notepad++ on Windows, but it definitely works well for me.

  4. Ale Muñoz / March 20th, 2007 11:15 am

    You should take a look at Consolas. The Windows version works flawlessly in Mac OS X, and the true italics make it a pleasure to use.

    It is both nice *and* useful, with clearly different characters for zero vs capital O, one vs lower case L, etc…

    I have been using it for so long I can’t imagine coding in anything else ; )

  5. Stephen / April 19th, 2007 6:58 pm

    Nice finds.

    I find Consolas a little too heavy. I must confess I just use Andale Mono at 13pt in TextMate.

  6. Roger Braunstein / April 20th, 2007 3:49 am

    Hey, I love the proggyfonts collection, all free at http://proggyfonts.com/

    Also, see my article on strongarming Eclipse/mac into displaying fonts without AA, including a pre-optimized font for your convenience.
    http://www.partlyhuman.com/blog/roger/aliased-text-mac-eclipse

  7. Henrik / April 28th, 2007 2:20 am

    Also, check out Deja Vu, at http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/. It’s based on Bitstream Vera.

    Here’s a quote from the description for Deja Vu:

    “The DejaVu fonts are a font family based on the Bitstream Vera Fonts
    (http://gnome.org/fonts/). Its purpose is to provide a wider range of
    characters (see status.txt for more information) while maintaining the
    original look and feel.

    DejaVu fonts are based on Bitstream Vera fonts version 1.10.”

  8. James / May 21st, 2007 3:37 pm

    Monoco is the only choice, wish I could use it when I’m on a pc, but none of the versions I have found render correctly

  9. Apteka internetowa / July 5th, 2007 12:21 pm

    It’s very good article. Great site with very good look and perfect information… Thanks

  10. farmazone / January 3rd, 2008 12:55 pm

    sorry for posting here but what about SWFMacMouseWheel AS3 version? are you plannig to release it?

    cheers

  11. Philipp / January 23rd, 2008 6:10 pm

    SWFMacMouseWheel AS3 - would really be great :)

  12. dizi izle / February 22nd, 2008 7:20 pm

    Thanks for this really useful article.Great cheat sheet, I appreciate it very much.

  13. daniel / June 2nd, 2008 7:24 am

    Choose Monaco on Textmate … handles any language you might want (xhtml, php, JS, AS2/3, ruby, c#, java, latex, rtc)…

    aint no better choice for coders than textmate… though it will take a while until you release the whole power of it by customizing it. but its worth the effort.

    sincere

  14. gabriel / June 3rd, 2008 10:12 am

    yeah, but you’re so wrong, textmate is good for some stuff, but for actionscript you should try FDT, it’s brilliant, you’ll never go back!

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