Whats in a font?
After years of software engineering I realized how much I loved certain fonts and hated others. My current favorite font is a custom implementation of commit mono.
You can download my custom font dev version here
You can download my custom font design version here
You can make your own custom font here
Lets take look at my choices.
Weight and Spacing Link to heading
Weight I kept at the default 400 with italics off.
Letter spacing I kept at 0% while moving my line height to 1.1. I enjoy the extra space on each line and feel it makes my code look neater.
Download Features Link to heading
I turn off ligatures, they are special characters that turn some multi-character coding entities into a single character and I do not like it. I also turn off fancy arrows.
I leave Smart Case, Symbol Spacing, and Smart Kerning. I cannot tell you exactly what they do I just toggled them on and off a few times to see what i liked.
Alternate Characters Link to heading
I felt swapping the following characters to their alternate versions enhances readability.
- g
- ‘6’, ‘9’
Settings Link to heading
{
"weight": 400,
"italic": false,
"alternates": {
"cv01": false,
"cv02": true,
"cv03": false,
"cv04": false,
"cv05": false,
"cv06": true,
"cv07": false,
"cv08": false,
"cv09": false,
"cv10": false,
"cv11": false
},
"features": {
"ss01": false,
"ss02": false,
"ss03": true,
"ss04": true,
"ss05": true
},
"letterSpacing": 0,
"lineHeight": 1.1,
"fontName": "-thesimpledev"
}
Use Link to heading
I have this font set up in my terminal for NeoVim and in VSCode. I feel it enhances the readability of code for me considerably. Remember as a software engineer you will spend more time reading code than writing it.