Sick of Courier New?
I was working with the TA for our Software Development class the other day and I noticed that he’d remapped his browser to display fixed-width fonts as Monaco instead of Courier New. It’s a good idea and I thought I’d repost it here in the service of others who were, like me, too dumb to come up with it on their own but still unsatisfied with their fixed-width font experience. The setting is in Firefox under Preferences -> Content -> Fonts & Colors -> Advanced.
Running Windows? This is similarly old news, but the new ClearType-enabled fonts that Microsoft released for Windows Vista work just fine in XP. I discovered this a couple of months ago when I installed Windows on my shiny new Mac via BootCamp and was suddenly acutely aware, in a way I never had been before, how ugly everything looked. Their new fixed-width font is called Consolas, and it’s lovely. You can grab them all here.
It’s not that Courier New is such a terrible font. Well actually, I guess it is.
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To be honest with you, I don’t know how anyone could truly be SICK of Courier New. It does its job and it does it well.
Courier New’s job is to make it easier to differentiate characters like 1 (one) and l (lowercase L). This is much in the same way that Comic Sans’ job is to make everything look like a seven-year-old’s letter to Santa Claus.
That having been said, I am very pleased to announce that I have entered an entirely new world of text editing employing Consolas and a little color scheme called Pyte within Vim 7.0.
I had to drop in again to say that Consolas is really growing on me now that I’ve been using it in VIM. The lowercase letters look especially nice in italics and although it takes a little getting used to, it’s quite elegant.
It’s quite nice, isn’t it? A good code font. The other fonts in the pack aren’t bad either.