Good Monospaced Programmer's Font

[tbp1...@gmail.com]

I was looking into the "Solarized" colorizing schemes, and learned that their developer,  Ethan Schoonover,  had preferred a font I had never heard of -  Cousine.  Turns out it is freely licensed and free to download.  It's a TTF font, so it can be installed into both Windows and Linux (I assume into Macs, too).

I just installed it and at first glance I like it better in Leo than Consolas.  Worth trying it out to see what you think.

[Edward K. Ream]

On Fri, Jun 11, 2021 at 10:53 PM tbp1...@gmail.com <tbp1...@gmail.com> wrote:

I was looking into the "Solarized" colorizing schemes, and learned that their developer,  Ethan Schoonover,  had preferred a font I had never heard of -  Cousine. 

Thanks for this. The font looks good to me.

Edward

[David Szent-Györgyi]

More about Cousine:

«Cousine is an open-source monospaced typeface designed by Steve Matteson and available for free through Google Fonts. It was designed to be metrically compatible with Courier New. Cousine is available in normal, italic, bold and bold italic styles. . . . 

SUGGESTED FONT PAIRING

Cousine + Source Sans Pro»

https://www.typewolf.com/cousine

[David Szent-Györgyi]

Cousine's designer is a professional with decades of experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Matteson

[David Szent-Györgyi]

Cousine is one of the Chrome OS core fonts, "Croscore fonts". Further font suggestions from the Wikipedia article on the Croscore fonts: 

Arimo (sans serif) - metrically compatible with Arial; 
Tinos (serif) - metrically compatible with Times New Roman; 
Carlito(sans serif, metrically compatible with Calibri), part of the Crosextra fonts; 
Caladea(serif, metrically compatible with Cambria), part of the Crosextra fonts; 
Version 2.0 of the Liberation fonts is based on the Croscore fonts.

Packages for the Crosextra fonts are available with current Linux distributions. LibreOffice bundles the Liberation fonts. 

[David Szent-Györgyi]

The Wikipedia article on the Croscore fonts also mentions the Noto fonts: 

«Noto is a font family comprising over 100 individual fonts, which are together designed to cover all the scripts encoded in the Unicode standard. As of October 2016, Noto fonts cover all 93 scripts defined in Unicode version 6.1 (April 2012), although fewer than 30,000 of the nearly 75,000 CJK unified ideographs in version 6.0 are covered. In total Noto fonts cover nearly 64,000 characters,[citation needed] which is under half of the 143,859 characters defined in Unicode 13.0 (released in March 2020).

The Noto family is designed with the goal of achieving visual harmony (e.g., compatible heights and stroke thicknesses) across multiple languages/scripts. Commissioned by Google, the font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License.»

Tracking a living, changing document such as the Unicode standard cannot be easy. There are multiple schemes for character sets and hinting for handling diacritical marks, and support for those varies across operating systems and applications. 

I don't know which scheme is used by the Qt stack that is the basis for Leo's default GUI, or whether the Qt stack uses one scheme across all its platforms.

I expect the Leo plugin for Visual Studio Code shall inherit the one from VSCode, which is based on the Chromium browser. 

[tbp1...@gmail.com]

My copy of vs code has this font setting:  Consolas, 'Courier New', monospace.  I don't think having the chrome browser component automatically gives you these other fonts.  Somehow, though, the character appearance looks very good on vs code, as if it tunes the hinting differently or something like that.