…with a font, that is! 🙂 If you haven’t guessed already, I like to write code. So, naturally, the one thing that I see the most during a normal day is fixed width font. Previously I didn’t care so much and used whatever default the operating system had. On Windows this is generally the [Courier New)] font. Recently, I started to look around to “spice up” my environment, and font was the first thing that came to my mind. So, I started looking around for options and ended up on Consolas.
Now, nothing is perfect and Consolas is no different. Consolas was designed with ClearType and pretty much for ClearType because it doesn’t look very good if you don’t have ClearType enabled (checkout the comparison in the wikipedia entry). That is something that I can live with because majority of the coding that I do is either through a shell session running on Windows or in some other Windows programs so it isn’t really an issue for me. For the cases when I do have to use other operating system, there is always the similar looking Inconsolata font.
To really enjoy this font I have all my fixed width programs set to 10pt font size, which I have noticed is the best size for this font. At this size the font looks awesome and you can easily distinguish the similar looking characters like o (lower case o), O (upper case O), and 0 (zero).
So, if you code a lot or look at fixed width fonts all day long for some other reason then I suggest that you should give this font a try, maybe, you too will fall in love with it! =D It comes standard on Windows Vista, for other Windows version you can download the Consolas Font Pack if you have Visual Studio.
If you are looking for some other options you might also want to consider another excellent font that supports box drawing: Envy Code R.