Quest Continues for Ultimate Programmer Font

San Francisco Mono

Amongst all many annoucements in WWDC 2016 came a new font, San Francisco Mono, called “SFmono” by some Apple folks. This discussion notes that while it appears similar to Google Roboto, this font has its roots in the San Francisco font family first delivered by Apple for use across its platforms. No, not that San Francisco:

This San Francisco:

Colored monospaced type starred center-stage in the posters, logos, web pages, and video intros at the WWDC 2016 event.

Subsequently, I learned of a couple more new fonts for programmers, Operator and CamingoCode. I show these below, along with my favorite programmer fonts, Menlo, Hack and Pragmata.

Operator

Operator is a commercial font from Hoefler & Co. Operator has its own story and video page. Here is an interesting shot of the Atom editor configured with styling.

CamingoCode by Jan Fromm is a commercial free-of-cost monospaced typeface designed for source-code editors. Features include “compact appearance and a moderate line height”, four styles (Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic), and manual hinting.

Menlo

Recent versions of macOS have seen the Menlo font bundled. This font is very usable for programming, certainly the best of the bundled font. Seems to be based on the DejaVu Mono font.

Hack

I have enjoyed using the open-source free-of-cost font, Hack. Evolved from the open-source font project DejaVu which came from Bitstream Vera.

Pragmata

But the best all-time programmer font continues to be Pragmata by Fabrizio Schiavi, a commercial font. This font is distinctive for its choice to go tall rather than wide. Comes it three families, a pair of “Pro” families each with 4 styles and one with ligatures and the other without, and the “Essential” family of only two styles and limited to English for a lower-cost alternative.