The Best Font For Coding (?)

I've been in this business for a few years now and I've been programming (in some form or other) since around 1986 (hello, BASIC!). Whereas in the past (see: University) I've been able to sit in front of a screen for 18 hours a day with only my contact lenses as protection, I've recently run into some issues that have made me re-examine how I treat my globes. Specifically: during successive business trips to a client site in Chicago, I came down with very unpleasant cases of conjunctivitis (also, see this write-up on HealthyOntario).

For starters, I've decided to look at how I've set up my development tools. I need to find the best, clearest, most ocularly soothing font for editing code in Flex Builder and elsewhere.

Eyeballing the best possible font

I've come across this fine site by Trevor Lowing which provides a collection (with clever examples) of different code-friendly "mono-spaced" fonts. It puts forward the following "good programming font criteria":

1. Crisp, clear characters
2. Extended character set
3. Good use of white space
4. 'l', '1' and 'i' are easily distinguished
5. '0', 'o' and 'O' are easily distinguished
6. Forward quotes are easily distinguished from back quotes (ideally with a "mirrored" appearance)
7. Clear punctuation characters, especially braces, parentheses and brackets

The list seems pretty complete to me, though I might add "thick enough for viewing on LCD screen", since some fonts seems downright Olsenish for my tastes...

Setting text editor fonts in FlexBuilder/Eclipse

If you're a Flex Builder/Eclipse user, here is how you change the font used for editing files:

Go to Window > Preferences
From there, go to General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts
Select Basic and double-click on "Text Font". The font settings dialog will pop up.


Make sure to have an editor open, so that when you click on "Ok" and then "Apply", you will see the font changing in the background. This will allow you to try a number of fonts until you get the settings just right.

Your take?

I plan on trying out new fonts in the coming weeks so I'd be interested in finding out what font you use for coding/scripting. What font size? What display configuration (size, single or dual display) and screen resolution?

Thanks for reading!


Taylor