Coding Font Selection ‘Tournament’

Via Jason Snell (back in October), who points first to this thread on Mastodon where a few of us posted about our preferences for the fonts we use for writing, and then describes this fun “tournament” from Typogram that lets you pick your favorite monospaced coding font from 32 choices. One limitation is that the only options are free fonts — some of my favorite monospaced fonts aren’t free and thus aren’t included (e.g. Consolas, Berkeley Mono, or Apple’s SF Mono). Another limitation is that some of the fonts in the tournament just plain suck. But it’s really pretty fun.

It’s also a good thing I procrastinated on linking to this for two months — it’s improved greatly in the weeks since Snell linked to it. The example code is now JavaScript, not CSS, which is a much better baseline for choosing a programming font. And there are some better font choices now.

I highly recommend you disable showing the font names while you play, to avoid any bias toward fonts you already think you have an opinion about. But no matter how many times I play, I always get the same winner: Adobe’s Source Code Pro. My second favorite in this tournament is IBM Plex Mono. The most conspicuous omission: Intel One Mono.

★ Tuesday, 24 December 2024