Aliased Fonts and Programming
• ~100 words • 0.7 minute read
After listening to this episode of "The Talk Show" on 5by5.tv 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 by Dan Benjamin 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 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](/media/2011/fontsize.png)
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!