Choosing a Good Editing Font

Sunday November 18, 2007

After a compiler, possibly the most important tools for any developer is the editor. Everyone has their own preferences on this, people work differently so saying that one editor is better than another is often highly subjective. I'm still stuck in a mindset that originated with the venerable word processor WordStar from the early 80s.

But of almost equal importance is the font (i.e. typeface) that you use. A good one should help distinguish between i and l or 0 and o as well as { and ( etc. This wekend I've been trying out a free font called dina. (a donation is nice if you do use it). It is crisp and clear and so far seems to work well in the Visual Studio editor. It's not TrueType so you are probably limited to 8,9 or 10 point text but it looks pretty good. The image shows part of the Match Runner C# code for the weekly Rock, Scissors and Paper Contest.

Talking of which, welcome to our tenth bot "WentuBot" from Italian developer Emiliano Venturini. Sadly it got a bit beat up and ended up 9th but better luck for future weeks!