Daring Fireball: Coding Font Selection ‘Tournament’

by Jason Snell (back in October), who first pointed out This post on mastodon A few of us posted about our preferences for fonts for writing, and then described this fun “tournament” by Typogram that lets you choose your favorite monospaced coded font from 32 options. One limitation is that the only options are free fonts – some of my favorite monospaced fonts are not free and therefore not included (e.g. game console, Berkeley Monoor Apple’s SF mono). Another limitation is that some of the fonts in the tournament are just terrible. But it’s really fun.

It’s also a good thing I delayed linking to this for two months – it’s improved a lot in the weeks since Snell linked to it. Sample code is now in JavaScript rather than CSS, which is a better baseline for selecting program fonts. There are some better font choices out there these days.

I highly recommend disabling the display of font names while playing to avoid any bias towards fonts you already think you have an opinion on. But no matter how many times I play, I always get the same winner: Adobe’s Source Code Professional Edition. My second favorite thing about this competition is IBM Plex Mono. The most glaring omission: Intel Mono.

★ Tuesday, 24 December 2024