Monospaced Fonts

Mono fonts are a mainstay of developer IDE and text editors alike. They allow for a clean, consistent look and feel when writing or reading code.

Italics

Personally I am a fan of Monospaced fonts that have good italic support. They are wonderful to work with when your editor and theme supports them, like Monokai Operator does in VS Code.

Cursive Italics

Although unusual at first, there is something quite pleasing to the eye when you see a cursive font in an editor. When your eyes adjust to the subtle highlighting of keywords and comments it makes your code a pleasure to behold. I would highly recommend trying a font that has cursive italics, you may never go back!

Ligatures

Yes please! They help simplify code and help to keep spacing for common symbols.

Font Choices

Operator Mono

The first mono font that I used supporting good editing italics was Operator Mono. A pretty font that comes at a cost and unfortunately does not support ligatures out of the box. Ligatures can be added with help from Operator Mono Lig).

Dank Mono

One of the most wonderful fonts I have used in an editor. Dank Mono is well designed for all displays, especially rentia; comes with ligature support, and is a fair bit cheaper than Operator Mono. The font has been stable for sometime and has been my go to since it was released in 2018.

Fira Code

The first font I used with ligature support was Fira Code. A lovely monospaced font without the fuss of italics. Free and open source.

JetBrains Mono

New out from JetBrains, JetBrains Mono. Clear and easy to read, has great ligatures and italics and although the italics are not cursive a pleasure to use. Free and open source and the default for JetBrains products, it looks great with a dark theme. I’m really hoping a cursive variant of this font appears someday.