Comments on: Lucida Console is My Font

By: nic

nic — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:24:06 +0000

I use Lucida Typeweriter in emacs. Can’t stand large anti-aliased fonts, and I’m not much a fan of sans serif either.

By: lingpipe

lingpipe — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:07:23 +0000

Thanks for the clarification -- I thought Lucida Console and Typewriter Sans were the same font. I'm using Lucida Sans Typewriter in LaTeX and Lucida Console in emacs and shell (on Windows). According to Wikipedia: Lucida, Lucida Console is "a variant of Lucida Sans Typewriter with smaller line spacing, added WGL4 character set." It didn't say the text itself was shorter, just the line spacing. Here's a nice page on line spacing from Thinking with Type, a book I really liked.

By: MSW

MSW — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 19:06:22 +0000

Yes Lucida Console is easier on the eyes than Inconsolata or Envy Code.

But there is a difference between Lucida Console and Lucida Sans Typewriter — Lucida Console is a bit shorter, giving more text in the same vertical area (horizontal sizing is the same). That’s worth something to me.

I don’t know where to find Lucida Console free, but it comes with Windows.

By: Brendan O'Connor

Brendan O'Connor — Fri, 22 May 2009 18:49:26 +0000

I agree, no antialiasing for <= 9 or 10pt. Monaco, the mac default, works well enough for me there.

By: lingpipe

lingpipe — Wed, 20 May 2009 16:00:04 +0000

@John Interesting comment about refactoring. I’m wondering if that explains why I’ve been using the bigger font more for the recent round of refactoring I’ve done. I figured it was just because it gets set as the default after lots of pair programming.

I still prefer the smaller font for creating new classes and especially for browsing big classes of mine or in other packages.

I also prefer the small font for shells, because it’s easier to see the output.

With the small font, I can get a good emacs and shell buffer side by side. I try to keep LingPipe code to 80 characters wide, but with generics, that’s getting harder and harder.

By: John

John — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:43:34 +0000

Anti-aliasing is best for large fonts anyway. Once you get below 10px, things start looking fuzzy and some letter details are anti-aliased away.

I just started using Inconsolata, and you’re right — at 9px it’s terrible. At 18px though, it’s great. And so far I’m really liking the larger typeface for coding; I’m finding I don’t really need to see all that information at once. What I really need to do is concentrate on the code I am writing or refactoring at the moment, and the rest of it is a disorienting distraction.