--- title: Aliased Fonts and Programming author: George Mandis date: 2011-06-26 description: What are the best fonts for programming? tags: post --- After listening to this episode of ["The Talk Show" on 5by5.tv](http://5by5.tv/talkshow/44) I've become a bit self-aware of my font choices for coding. I use TextMate with the font set to anti-aliased Monaco, 11pt. Or at least, I did. Towards the end of the podcast they started discussing an old post on [Hacker News][1] by [Dan Benjamin][2] about the best fonts and sizes for programming. Evidently Monaco 9 ,sans anti-aliasing, is the standard. I'm trying that right now on [my Macbook Air][3] at 1440x900 on a 13-inch screen, all I can say is WTF? I don't have the best vision in the world, but I'm finding this very straining on the eyes. Yuck. programming font sizes It does, however, destroy the occasional ambiguity between certain numbers and letters, like **O**, **0** and **o** or **l** **1** and **|**. But it's not worth it for me; I miss my pretty, [anti-aliased text][4]! [1]:http://news.ycombinator.com/ [2]:http://hivelogic.com/ [3]:http://blog.georgemandis.com/2011/02/02/my-macbook-air-experiment.html [4]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_anti-aliasing