The other day I wrote about Emacs themes. It’s amazing how much difference a well chosen theme can make to your peace of mind and productivity. Just as important is the choice of a programming font. Fortunately, Emacs can support just about any font and can even look elsewhere for missing glyphs. It’s really just a matter of deciding on a font, installing it, and telling Emacs to use it.
Not all that long ago, monospaced fonts weren’t antialiased and were really ugly. Now there are several good, free fonts to choose from. Jacob Gube over at Six Revisions has a great article on 10 excellent free programmers’ fonts. Each font has a screen shot and additional information, including where to get it.
I’m a long-time user of Inconsolata, which is one of the fonts he lists, and am very happy with it. My only complaint with it is that the l (ell) and 1 (one) are a bit hard to tell apart. Some of the other fonts do better. Source Code Pro, for example has a very distinctive ell that can’t be mistaken for a one. Others have a distinctive one with an exaggerated serif at the top. Oddly, the otherwise excellent Droid Sans Mono has a zero and oh that are very difficult to tell apart unless you see them together.
If you’re looking for a new font or you just want to see some of the other choices, take a look at Gube’s article. It’s a nice set of choices and is sure to have something for just about everyone.