IDE Fonts

Courier New, anyone?

When I started coding in Windows, I liked the font in Turbo C++ a lot. Then when Andale Mono came out, I switched to that in VS from the default. Then to Consolas when that came out. Then, I used Input Font, which is not a mono spaced font. I can cram more text on the screen and it was still pretty enough and legible. I liked it except in cases where I had to line up multi-line assignments. It did have a little quirk when installing on Windows – it's documented on their site.

Then, as I got to learn React, noticed a peculiar font that had italics for the attribute names. Dan Abramov was using it. Afterwards, I noticed John Papa was also using it in VS Code for Angular. The font is called Operator Mono. So I googled it, and found it to be a bit pricey... But I found an alternative that seems to accomplish the similar effect for free with Fira Code font and Script12 BT font. Fira Code also has different ligatures for common programming operators, though your editor needs to support ligatures (VS Code and Atom both do).

Through this Github discussion, found a font that already combines Fira Code and Script12. So I installed that, and also a theme that supports italics. Here's what it looks like in my VS Code:

Not sure if I like the italics actually, will have to try it out for a bit.

Epilogue

I don't remember the name of the font that was used in Turbo C++ for Windows, so I tried to search for it. Alas, Google is unable to find it. The closest I came to is OCR-A, which seems similar enough, and perhaps it might actually be the font that was used, though being purposefully made for OCR, probably not...