Why use monospace fonts in your IDE?

ide fonts text-editor
Rik picture Rik · Oct 20, 2008 · Viewed 29.3k times · Source

I've seen a couple of font topics on SO and it seems a majority of people use monospace fonts for programming tasks. I have been using Verdana for programming for a couple of years and I really like the enhanced readability, without missing anything monospace related.

Why do you use a monospace font?

Answer

Ryan picture Ryan · Oct 20, 2008

In a monospace font:

  • Equal-length string literals look equal.
  • It's easier to see thin punctuation marks like : () {}
  • Similar characters look more different: Il 0O vs Il 0O
  • You know whether or not a line will wrap on a window X characters wide. This means that your team can standardize on say 100 character lines and a line will always look like a line

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