The Best Font for Mac Programmers, ProFont

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?

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.