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The Best Font for Mac Programmers, ProFont

Posted On: January 11th, 2006 by kencollins

After being exposed to using TextMate for all my normal text editing needs, I soon began to do more things than just simple GREP-based search and replace functions. I actually started to look at code more often. Within a few short months, I had gone away from my established norm of the happenstantial viewing of simple CSS, HTML and PlainText files to a ful-time lookey lou of languages such as Ruby, XML, PHP, SQL or any number of configuration files for Apache, PHP, Postfix, Bind, and so on. It's been an exciting time for me over the past 6 months and it feels like open hunting season on any hard to find UNIX application files that are deep in the brush of my Mac OS X. Belive me, treasure are rich once you start digging.

So What's Great About ProFont?

ProFont vs. Apple's Monoco

On the left, you can see ProFont compared to the original version of Apple's Monaco font face. This picture was taken from the ProFont distribution readme file. It really shows the differences in how it treats zeros, apostrophes, lowercase L, upper I, colons, and semi colons. This stuff makes it really important if you are looking at code all the time. Profont even shines in the Terminal window too. Size matters too, ProFont works well at 9pt if your eyes are holding up that well, mine are not, so I have to stick at 10pt.

Where Do I Get ProFont?

Right here. I've packaged it for Mac and Windows. If your a Linux or Atari junky and want ProFont, go check out an indepentdant maintainer for the font and download those verions from his website.

For-Somazx

  HOMEPAGE  | February 12th, 2006 at 05:46 AM
For-Somazx I couldn't get profont working for OS X. The archive you link to looks very OS 9'ish and every sub folder is the archive was empty. Another good location for fixed width/terminal/programming fonts is this site: http://www.lowing.org/fonts/ Personally I've grown to like the Anonymous font: http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymous.html

Ken Collins

  HOMEPAGE  | February 12th, 2006 at 05:50 AM
Ken Collins I fixed the ProFont download on this site and I am really going to take a look at anonymous too. Thanks for those two great link.

Anonymous

  HOMEPAGE  | February 13th, 2006 at 10:09 PM
Anonymous I actualyl find it to be about perfect for a developer font.

Ken Collins

  HOMEPAGE  | February 14th, 2006 at 04:27 AM
Ken Collins And at 10pt it was a little to hard on the eye. The equal sign kerning was right up agains the other letters and overall it was a strain to see. I did like it at 12pt, but that is to large for my work space, even with my bad eyes. Thanks for the heads up!

Geir-Tore

  HOMEPAGE  | March 15th, 2006 at 09:19 PM
Geir-Tore Thanks for the tip about the Anonymous font. Currently I'm using Andale Mono 11pt as my font in TextMate and likes it a lot. Not sure where I got it from though...

Basil

  HOMEPAGE  | April 10th, 2006 at 06:09 PM
Basil DejaVu rapidly-developing open-source free-of-cost font family, including a monospaced font, spawned from Bitstream Vera. DejaVu has many characters for many languages & specialties. Some versions of Linux are making DejaVu their default font. http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/

Ken Collins

  HOMEPAGE  | April 11th, 2006 at 06:02 AM
Ken Collins

I was just reading a post on the TextMate blog about Bitstream Vera Sans Mono and tried it out. It was OK looking at first but I like my font size around 10px and it did not appear to compete well with ProFont. For instance I did not like zeros and various meta characters.

I just downloaded DejuVu and had the exact same experience. At 10px it was terrible looking. At 12px it got better, but I still did not like the look of those damned zeros and more importantly, 10px is what I need. Thanks for the head up though.