When I first started serious programming, I didn’t really pay much attention to what font I was using — I just used to go with the defaults. It wasn’t until I was reading an introductory book on Java by [[wp>James_Gosling|James Gosling]] (it was one of the early editions of //The Java Programming Language//) that I realized what I was missing. They had used Lucida Sans Typewriter for all of the code samples in that book and I just immediately fell in love. Fortunately, the Java SDK has always shipped with that font, so obtaining the font wasn’t a problem.

{{ http://floatingsun.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/fonts.png|Monospace Fonts}}

I stuck with Lucida Sans Typewriter for a very long time, at least a couple of years. After starting grad school, when I started playing around with Debian, I heard of a new family of free fonts called [[http://www.gnome.org/fonts/|Bitstream Vera]]. The fixed font in that family was very catchy — at that time, the GNOME folks had a lot of screenshots up on the web (all featuring Bitstream Vera), it was plain, simple, crisp and a refreshing change from Lucida Sans Typewriter. And a huge plus was that gVim looked beautiful with Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.

And so it was for another few years. Recently though, a new font seems to have taken the editing world by storm. Thanks to the new found love developers have found for the Mac OS, as well as the inadvertant evangelizing by the likes of [[http://macromates.com/|Textmate]], [[http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts|Ruby on Rails]], [[http://turbogears.org/|Turbogears]] etc, [[wp>Monaco_%28typeface%29|Monaco]] has become immensely popular. To me, its greatest appeal is that at first glance it doesn’t //seem// like its a fixed-width font, and its curves are strangely enticing. You can find a copy of the font for use on Linux at [[http://www.gringod.com/2006/11/01/new-version-of-monaco-font/|GrinGod]].

So what are your favorite monospace fonts?