When choosing a font for casual reading, the reader expects the letters to smoothly flow into one another, giving an easy and enjoyable experience. A single character for a standard font is akin to puzzle piece designed to carefully mesh with every other part of the overall typeface.
When writing code, however, your font requirements are typically more functional in nature. This is why most programmers prefer to use monospaced fonts with fixed-width letters, when given the option.
In this article, we will explore open-source fonts which every programmer should know.
1. Monoid
Monoid is customizable and optimized for coding with bitmap-like sharpness at this fontsize even on low res displays. It comes in regular, bold, oblique and retina versions with >750 latin, greek, cyrillic, ligature, alternate and powerline glyphs.
2 Cascadia Code
Cascadia Code is the latest monospaced font shipped from Microsoft and provides a fresh experience for command line experiences and code editors. Cascadia Code was developed hand-in-hand with the new Windows Terminal application. This font is most recommended to be used with terminal applications and text editors such as Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.
3 Source Code Pro
Source Code Pro was produced by Adobe to be one of its first open source fonts. Source Code Pro is notable in that it is extremely readable and has excellent differentiation between potentially confusing characters and punctuation. Source Code Pro is also a font family and comes in seven different styles: Extralight, Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, and Black, with italic variants of each.
4 Fira Code
FiraCode is an extension of Fira, the open source font family commissioned by Mozilla. What makes FiraCode different is that it modifies the common symbol combinations or ligatures used in code to be extraordinarily readable. This font family comes in several styles, notably including a Retina option. You can find examples for how it applies to many programming languages on its GitHub page..
5 JetBrains Mono
JetBrains Mono is available as a standalone download, and is also bundled in all JetBrains IDEs. Discover more font features & design on its web page. Default version of JetBrains Mono comes with OpenType features and ligatures (which can always be toggled on & off in the settings). If your IDE doesn’t support OpenType, use a special version of the font — JetBrains Mono NL, which doesn’t include any ligatures.
6. Inconsolata
Inconsolata draws inspiration from the ubiquitous Consolas font by Microsoft. Inconsolata was developed by Raph Levien, a Google engineer currently assigned to the Android platform. Levien says on his site that though there are many great programming fonts, many of them “do not have the attention to detail for high resolution rendering.”
7. Noto Mono:
Noto Mono, the monospaced version of the expansive Noto font family by Google. While not specifically designed for programming, Noto Mono is available in 209 languages (including emoji!) and is actively supported and updated. The project is enormous and is an extension of Google's stated mission to organize the world's information
8. Hack
Hack is an open source derivative of the fantastic Bitstream Vera Sans Mono typeface. It includes new glyphs and modifications of the original glyph set with the intent to make source code characters easily discernible at commonly used desktop (and laptop) display glyph sizes, and to make source code structure more legible. This Font Software is licensed under a modified version of the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1 and the Bitstream Vera License.
9. Ubuntu Mono
Ubuntu Mono is available via an open source license. You're free to use it with your Adobe Fonts account just as you would any other font in the Adobe Fonts library. For information regarding other uses of Ubuntu Mono, see copyright and license details for Ubuntu Mono Regular, Ubuntu Mono Italic, Ubuntu Mono Bold, and Ubuntu Mono Bold Italic.
10. DejaVu Sans Mono
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.
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