6 Best Fonts for Coding to Keep Your Eyes from Eyestrain

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Published in
4 min readAug 25, 2021

As a programmer, we work with code all day. Ensuring that code is presented in a readable and clear format is one key to productive coding. One reason that makes you stronger to deal with code every single hour is the type of font you used. There’s a lot of font types created for coding language, aimed to make the typography look more beautiful. So you won’t be bored and stressed if you stay up longer looking at million of syntaxes and thousands of lines every day. It also strains your eyes, so you feel tired quickly. Hence here are some fonts that can keep your eyes from eyestrain:

1. Consolas

Consolas was designed by Lucas de Groot as a monospaced typeface. Used for Microsoft included in all Windows installations. For Windows users, you are likely using this type of font. This font offers slightly bolder text than other coding typography but does have some readability issues, for example, the same characters for 1 and l.

Source: https://itnext.io/11-best-programming-fonts-724283a9ed57

2. Menlo

Menlo was designed by Jim Lyles as a monospaced typeface. Used in Apple as its new default font for Terminal and Xcode. This font For Mac users, you will commonly know this type of font and likely use it. As you can see, Menlo and Consolas look pretty similar but Menlo is a bit wider.

Source: https://itnext.io/11-best-programming-fonts-724283a9ed57

3. Ubuntu Mono

Ubuntu mono is a workhorse font that’s very easy to read, clear, and sharp at a variety of resolutions design for Ubuntu that funded by Canonical (creators of Ubuntu Linux). This font is a default monospaced typeface in Ubuntu. It works well for body text as well as coding and staring and day after day won’t cause eye fatigue or headaches. Plus, if you just love Ubuntu but have to work on macOS or Windows, this gives you a little sense of home.

Source: https://itnext.io/11-best-programming-fonts-724283a9ed57

4. Fira Code

Fira Code is one popular monospaced type font among developers. It’s very easy to get started and combine with VS Code. It supports the font ligature feature which can combine two or more characters into a single character to make code easier to read and understand. This font is also open-source and free. If you talk about reducing eyestrain, this font can be helpful for it.

Source: https://fedoramagazine.org/5-great-monospaced-fonts-for-coding-and-the-terminal-in-fedora/

5. Source Code Pro

Source code pro was created by Paul D. Hunt as a monospaced open-source sans serif typeface for the Adobe system. This font available through Google Fonts intended to work well in the user interface environment. Overall the text looks clearer than other fonts because of the variety, so the characters can be distinguished. It has one variation that is highly recommended because this average in terms of thickness is convenient, which makes it very readable.

Source: https://fedoramagazine.org/5-great-monospaced-fonts-for-coding-and-the-terminal-in-fedora/

6. Hack

Hack is a free font, open-source typography designed especially for programming, with all the essential features such as easily distinguishable O and 0 characters. This font is a non-default font. Can extend the contribution of the Bitstream Vera & DejaVu project. Letters, punctuation, and symbols are balanced and easy to distinguish so using this font can make the code easy to read. Regular weights are comfortable to read at small text sizes used for source code development. Because there’s a whole library of user-generated alternative glyphs that you can add if you want. Because of this, hacks are highly customizable — you can go right into the details of each glyph and edit them yourself if no one else does it exactly the way you want.

Source: https://fedoramagazine.org/5-great-monospaced-fonts-for-coding-and-the-terminal-in-fedora/

As you can see, there are default and non-default fonts. The numbers 1 through 4 are the default fonts and the number 6 is a non-default font which means you have to download it first if you want to use it. A good programming font should be monospaced. What is meant by “monospace” is that each character occupies the same amount of horizontal space on the screen. This allows the text to line up nicely in your source code.

Developers love to customize their environments to make them more pretty and convenient. They install cool themes, cool fonts, and handy plugins. And that’s several type fonts that can help to keep your eyes from eyestrain. If you ask what type should you use? It depends on your preference. Hope this helps you.

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