fonts

11 Best Programming Fonts

It’s that time of the year once again, when you should take a five minute break from whatever it is you are doing. Here are “11 Best Programming Fonts” that might help you out in being a little bit more productive. If not that, than at least bring you a slight change and some eye candy, when staring at your code.

For me personally, Source Code Pro by Adobe (featured in the screenshot above) is still the best option. I have it setup in the Terminator as Source Code Pro Semibold at size 11, which makes it large enough to work with the code comfortably and small enough to eat too much screen space.

If you want to find and compare more fonts, have a look at these two resources:

Nerd Fonts – Iconic font aggregator, collection, and patcher

Nerd Fonts is a collection of fonts for people who work with code snippets, command line, and text-based user interface applications. The fonts are also patched with additional popular icon sets like Font Awesome, Devicons, Octicons, and others.

Fedora 27 and high DPI support

I’ve recently updated my laptop to Fedora 27 and since then I had some issues with the rendering of the desktop fonts. At first, everything seemed too large and over-magnified. Resetting the desktop fonts to much smaller sizes helped a bit, but there were still random issues with different applications – Google Chrome, Skype, etc. I think these much be related to the recent improvements to high DPI support.

A few things helped me a long the way. Here are the links, just in case I’ll need to find them in the future:

Ultimately, the things that solved my problems were the last link (installing better fonts for Fedora), and adjusting the fonts resolution from 142 dots per inch down to 96.

Front-End Checklist

This Front-End Checklist is pretty awesome and quite extensive:

The Front-End Checklist is an exhaustive list of all elements you need to have / to test before launching your site / page HTML to production.

It is based on Front-End developers’ years of experience, with the addition from some other open-source checklists.

It goes over generic HTML bits, meta information, web fonts, CSS, images, JavaScript, security, accessibility, performance and more.

The best part is that large parts of this list are pretty easy to automate and integrate with your deployment / continuous delivery tool chain.

WordPress Plugin : Typecase Web Fonts

Disclaimer: I’m not much of a fonts guy, but once in a while I just want to be.

I was reading the “Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API” article, when I realized I liked the font it was written in very much. I liked it so much that I immediately wanted to have it on my blog too. Chromium Inspector tool helped identify it as Ubuntu font family.

I have no problem editing WordPress themes’ CSS files, but I prefer to avoid it whenever possible. So a quick Google search later I found this blog post, which describes how to customize fonts in the Twenty Fifteen theme, which is coincidentally what I’m using currently.

The blog post recommended Typecase Web Fonts plugin. I installed it and started playing around with it, and I have to say it’s pretty amazing. Basically, it provides a font search tool in the WordPress admin. Once you find the font, it shows you the preview text and some font details. You then add CSS selectors on which you want this font to apply. It took me literally 3 minutes to figure it all out. You can even add multiple fonts. For example, since now I had sans-serif font for the blog content, I wanted to use a serif font for the headings – boom! – and I have Roboto Slab font to compliment Ubuntu.

The plugin is so easy to use and is so handy that I think we’ll be using it at work now too. Check it out.