wow, you found it while I was developing the feature – i am being crappy not having a dev site and everything is done to the live site! I finished developing it, now it is moved from the bottom to a more prominent place on the page!
One thing I noticed was that there was only one pair of parentheses. A few of the fonts had braces that looked really like parentheses but it wasn’t obvious from just looking at the text. Something with nested brackets would make this much easier to spot. Similarly, most of these fonts made it easy to tell 0 and O apart, but I don’t know how many of them made it easy to distinguish 1 and I or I and l because the sample text didn’t have these characters nearby.
It would be a bit more robust if it showed things more than once. There were a couple of fonts in the list that were almost identical (different shape of 5, most other glyphs basically the same). A few of them happened to look really good or bad at 16pt with my monitor size and antialiasing mode (Ubuntu Mono, in particular, looked terrible) but might be very different at different sizes. Once you’ve made a selection against something though, it’s gone forever, so you don’t get to find a ranking of preferred fonts.
It would also be good if it didn’t tell me the name of the font until after I made my choice. My favourite according to this is Adobe’s Source Code Pro. Purely by coincidence, that’s the font that I have installed for all of my terminals to use. Or possibly seeing the name gave me a positive bias towards it that I wouldn’t have seen if I’d been comparing it without knowing the name.
Nice! I could pick Inconsolata out blind (used to be my default) and blind-bracket led me to Roboto Mono, which I’ve used in various presentations.
But one of the best things I did for myself was figure out how to write the config file for Iosevka and customize my own variant. It took an afternoon, but I was able to cobble together a font with all the subtle nuances I prefer and it makes me happy every time (and I dig Iosevka’s thinner stature in general)
you don’t even need to spend an afternoon figuring that out, the iosevka folks have an online tool for generating the config: https://typeof.net/Iosevka/customizer
That (customizability, and the online customizer) is kind of incredible. I’ve never heard of a font whose designers let you download a tweaked version, at least not tweaked to this extent. I might just have to test drive this.
I currently use Inconsolata-g on one machine, DejaVu Sans Code on another. The latter is absent from this site, and I don’t see a way to suggest a font (other than the social media links provided). Going through the test, I ended up with Cousine, and am test-driving it. I’d heard of it before, and don’t remember why it isn’t my current font.
This is great, thank you! Just went through the tournament. The final showdown was between PT Mono and IBM Plex Mono. I went through it in Blind Mode so I wouldn’t be swayed by preference for font foundries or vendors etc. :)
Feature idea: when you finally hit the final match, it would be great to show what the runner-up was, just in case you end up second-guessing your final vote. In my case I will probably actually settle on my runner-up, as it offers different weights (whereas my winner has only one weight, which I didn’t know while voting). More versatile for different purposes etc.
I did the tournament for 3 times. First with font name shown and the rest are hidden. Out of 3 round. I have no idea why “IBM Plex Mono” always win.
In the last round the font are very similar, which are “Fira Mono” vs “IBM Plex Mono”. The last details I choose are the looks of g, curly braces, and 0.
Great game, I love the blind mode. In the end the tournament winner was my previously used font, but only because the font I’m using (Iosevka) is not available.
Very neat project. I’ve been using Inconsolata as my terminal font for a long time, and it was ranked pretty highly when I went through the site. But actually Noto Sans was the overall winner for me, and I discovered that also rather liked Fira Sans or Fira Mono (those two look basically identical to me, even comparing them side-by-side). Oxygen Mono is also not bad-looking. I just got a new computer, so since I’m setting up my dev environment there anyway I might try out one of these fonts as a default for a bit and see how it compares to Inconsolata long-term.
I also discovered some fonts that I definitely don’t like, at least not as a terminal font. Major Mono seems to deliberately use glyphs that look like upper-case letters for lower case ones, and in general looks like a dystopian sci-fi font, which is not at all what I want when I’m coding. And Nova Mono is way too cursive-looking for an ostensibly monospace coding font.
But please add the list of eliminations at the end, so I can see the 5-10 that were eliminated last, because I don’t think winner-takes-it-all makes sense here, but I’d like to actually test at least the 3-4 “winners”.
Kinda bummed out that my one true love Meslo was missing from the list - I was hoping to validate the choice of font I’ve stuck to for the last decade blind, but ah well - I guess if Meslo goes away someday I’ll know I’ll be happy enough with source code pro apparently.
My top two were oxygen-mono and fira-mono, but both of these look pretty spaced out when I use them in the terminal. I much prefer Hack-mono over both when looking at both in my terminal and code windows.
This as a iTerm / IntelliJ plugin would be super neat.
I enjoyed this, but probably didn’t spend enough time evaluating each. I too went through in blind mode. I ended up on “overpass mono”, and was happy with my choice until I made the switch in Emacs: suddenly it was too tall and thin! I’ll stick with Jetbrains Mono for now, but it would sure be interesting to go back and find out where that lost out in the contest :-)
I just love Fira Mono. But Source Code Pro was very close, too.
It depends on the screen and eyesight as well. I’ve used to prefer much sharper fonts on 1080p screen - before getting glasses to correct for my astigmatism. With corrected eyesight and 4k screen, I tend to prefer much fancier fonts. Probably because they are still sharp enough and I don’t need them to be pixel-aligned to remain readable.
I’m curious what OS you’re using. Windows’ font rendering tries to align lines in fonts to pixel boundaries so that you get sharp edges at the expense of slightly inaccurate kerning. Apple’s fond rendering tries to place lines exactly where they should be and so relies more on antialiasing and makes glyphs look slightly blurry but with better kerning. I don’t know where various other *NIX systems fall on this line these days, but those two extremes are likely to cause very different experiences.
I end up choosing coding fonts based on the application and OS. For example, there are only a few nerd fonts that properly render tmux pane and nvim popup borders in Windows Terminal, namely sauce code pro and ubuntu. On Linux most nerd fonts just work. On Mac OS I have to choose a thinner font as the Mac renders fonts “thick” according to my eyes.
This was fun! But a bit of a bitch to get working with uMatrix - it uses many scripts from different places and nested iframes. I guess that’s the price you pay for using nocode platforms.
Nice idea – would be great if there were multiple example languages to choose from (python, c++, something functional).
And perhaps a “blind test” mode where you choose A or B so you are not biased by the fonts you know.
Hear, hear.
I tried to get the window set up just right to avoid seeing the names, but it was tough.
Your voice are heard! I added a new toggle button to hide the font names! Try refresh / hard refresh the page to find a toggle for “Blind Mode”
I’d love to be able to see the full tournament bracket after doing a whole run in blind mode, so I can see what my second, third etc. choices were.
Ah yeah that’s what I was saying as well. At least the 2nd-place runner-up, but yeah showing the full ladder would be great too!
There is a “blind match” button at the bottom of the page.
wow, you found it while I was developing the feature – i am being crappy not having a dev site and everything is done to the live site! I finished developing it, now it is moved from the bottom to a more prominent place on the page!
That probably explains why it seemed that button wasn’t there the first time I loaded the page. ;-)
And well, you probably don’t need a QA server right now considering that you apparently didn’t (visibly) break the website while doing your changes!
One thing I noticed was that there was only one pair of parentheses. A few of the fonts had braces that looked really like parentheses but it wasn’t obvious from just looking at the text. Something with nested brackets would make this much easier to spot. Similarly, most of these fonts made it easy to tell 0 and O apart, but I don’t know how many of them made it easy to distinguish 1 and I or I and l because the sample text didn’t have these characters nearby.
It would be a bit more robust if it showed things more than once. There were a couple of fonts in the list that were almost identical (different shape of 5, most other glyphs basically the same). A few of them happened to look really good or bad at 16pt with my monitor size and antialiasing mode (Ubuntu Mono, in particular, looked terrible) but might be very different at different sizes. Once you’ve made a selection against something though, it’s gone forever, so you don’t get to find a ranking of preferred fonts.
It would also be good if it didn’t tell me the name of the font until after I made my choice. My favourite according to this is Adobe’s Source Code Pro. Purely by coincidence, that’s the font that I have installed for all of my terminals to use. Or possibly seeing the name gave me a positive bias towards it that I wouldn’t have seen if I’d been comparing it without knowing the name.
I ended up just picking the font I already use… So I guess its working
More likely we are somewhat biased to the fonts we’re used to.
Perhaps if we used a different font for a few weeks, our snap judgement would alter as well.
Nice! I could pick Inconsolata out blind (used to be my default) and blind-bracket led me to Roboto Mono, which I’ve used in various presentations.
But one of the best things I did for myself was figure out how to write the config file for Iosevka and customize my own variant. It took an afternoon, but I was able to cobble together a font with all the subtle nuances I prefer and it makes me happy every time (and I dig Iosevka’s thinner stature in general)
you don’t even need to spend an afternoon figuring that out, the iosevka folks have an online tool for generating the config: https://typeof.net/Iosevka/customizer
That (customizability, and the online customizer) is kind of incredible. I’ve never heard of a font whose designers let you download a tweaked version, at least not tweaked to this extent. I might just have to test drive this.
I currently use Inconsolata-g on one machine, DejaVu Sans Code on another. The latter is absent from this site, and I don’t see a way to suggest a font (other than the social media links provided). Going through the test, I ended up with Cousine, and am test-driving it. I’d heard of it before, and don’t remember why it isn’t my current font.
Yeah, my font of choice (Iosevka) is also absent and I would like to add it to the set, but there is no information how to do so.
Either no font listed is a ligature font, or else the example text does not show off the ligatures, which is unfortunate.
I saw at least one ligature, which made me chose the other font in that match :)
Of the fonts provided, I (unsurprisingly) ended up with Inconsolata.
That being said, I like Go Mono quite a bit so if that had been included it would’ve perhaps come down to a coin toss.
This is great, thank you! Just went through the tournament. The final showdown was between PT Mono and IBM Plex Mono. I went through it in Blind Mode so I wouldn’t be swayed by preference for font foundries or vendors etc. :)
Feature idea: when you finally hit the final match, it would be great to show what the runner-up was, just in case you end up second-guessing your final vote. In my case I will probably actually settle on my runner-up, as it offers different weights (whereas my winner has only one weight, which I didn’t know while voting). More versatile for different purposes etc.
I did the tournament for 3 times. First with font name shown and the rest are hidden. Out of 3 round. I have no idea why “IBM Plex Mono” always win.
In the last round the font are very similar, which are “Fira Mono” vs “IBM Plex Mono”. The last details I choose are the looks of
g,curly braces, and0.Something’s up with the antialiasing for me. Seems like text isn’t being snapped to the grid.
Great site, unfortunately it does not have my current favorite as a contestant: https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code
Great game, I love the blind mode. In the end the tournament winner was my previously used font, but only because the font I’m using (Iosevka) is not available.
This was fun, and a needed tool to help choose from the endless swamp of fonts.
Very neat project. I’ve been using Inconsolata as my terminal font for a long time, and it was ranked pretty highly when I went through the site. But actually Noto Sans was the overall winner for me, and I discovered that also rather liked Fira Sans or Fira Mono (those two look basically identical to me, even comparing them side-by-side). Oxygen Mono is also not bad-looking. I just got a new computer, so since I’m setting up my dev environment there anyway I might try out one of these fonts as a default for a bit and see how it compares to Inconsolata long-term.
I also discovered some fonts that I definitely don’t like, at least not as a terminal font. Major Mono seems to deliberately use glyphs that look like upper-case letters for lower case ones, and in general looks like a dystopian sci-fi font, which is not at all what I want when I’m coding. And Nova Mono is way too cursive-looking for an ostensibly monospace coding font.
That was fun! It gave me a “The Social Network” facemash vibe without being toxic :)
This is awesome!
But please add the list of eliminations at the end, so I can see the 5-10 that were eliminated last, because I don’t think winner-takes-it-all makes sense here, but I’d like to actually test at least the 3-4 “winners”.
missing the font I use :l (hack)
I like the idea. No ligatures is a dealbreaker for me unfortunately.
Nice, I’ve never picked a font for coding before, I’ve ended up with Fira code, which is definitely a bit different to the defaults I was using before
Kinda bummed out that my one true love Meslo was missing from the list - I was hoping to validate the choice of font I’ve stuck to for the last decade blind, but ah well - I guess if Meslo goes away someday I’ll know I’ll be happy enough with source code pro apparently.
Nice site!
My top two were oxygen-mono and fira-mono, but both of these look pretty spaced out when I use them in the terminal. I much prefer Hack-mono over both when looking at both in my terminal and code windows.
This as a iTerm / IntelliJ plugin would be super neat.
How about one for color schemes? Or even mix in both?
I enjoyed this, but probably didn’t spend enough time evaluating each. I too went through in blind mode. I ended up on “overpass mono”, and was happy with my choice until I made the switch in Emacs: suddenly it was too tall and thin! I’ll stick with Jetbrains Mono for now, but it would sure be interesting to go back and find out where that lost out in the contest :-)
i picked my font (ibm plex, i actually use “blex” nerd font version)
but wow, i quite like anonymous pro, i may have to try that guy out
I just love Fira Mono. But Source Code Pro was very close, too.
It depends on the screen and eyesight as well. I’ve used to prefer much sharper fonts on 1080p screen - before getting glasses to correct for my astigmatism. With corrected eyesight and 4k screen, I tend to prefer much fancier fonts. Probably because they are still sharp enough and I don’t need them to be pixel-aligned to remain readable.
I’m curious what OS you’re using. Windows’ font rendering tries to align lines in fonts to pixel boundaries so that you get sharp edges at the expense of slightly inaccurate kerning. Apple’s fond rendering tries to place lines exactly where they should be and so relies more on antialiasing and makes glyphs look slightly blurry but with better kerning. I don’t know where various other *NIX systems fall on this line these days, but those two extremes are likely to cause very different experiences.
Fedora.
VT323, WOOHOO!
I end up choosing coding fonts based on the application and OS. For example, there are only a few nerd fonts that properly render tmux pane and nvim popup borders in Windows Terminal, namely sauce code pro and ubuntu. On Linux most nerd fonts just work. On Mac OS I have to choose a thinner font as the Mac renders fonts “thick” according to my eyes.
This reminds me to try out a tool of Gwern’s: https://www.gwern.net/Resorter
My love is fixedsys font.
This was fun! But a bit of a bitch to get working with uMatrix - it uses many scripts from different places and nested iframes. I guess that’s the price you pay for using nocode platforms.
Not sure the “emacs” and “vim” tags fit the post very well.
Personally it seems like I just like the bolder font. Well, thanks for the new font!
Tried this with “Hide Font Names” toggled and ended up with the same font I currently use.
Would be nice to see the braces once you hit the result so there’s also the option to pick from the closest to first fonts.
By the way, Ubuntu Mono has been replaced with DejaVu Sans Mono on Ubuntu a few years back. I’m not sure many people use Ubuntu Mono anymore.
For what it’s worth, I use Ubuntu Mono on several OSs, but I don’t run Ubuntu itself. I just really like the font.
I like the shape but it has an unfortunate problem of being noticeably smaller at same nominal sizes, compared to other fonts.