# 5 Special Fonts for Programming

Did you know that there are fonts thought out, considered and designed for code?

In reality, when these fonts have a few very specific characteristics, they make programming much gentler on the eyes!

Here are a few of these characteristics

Monospace

A "monospace" font (or "à chasse fixe" in French) means that every written character will have exactly the same width (digits, letters, punctuation, spaces, etc...)

It's one of the essential characteristics for being useful in a code editor!

Ligatures

A ligature is when several written symbols are merged together to form a third symbol, often because it has a precise meaning.

In French, the most common ligature is "œ" formed from "o" and "e"

In code, we come across some fonts with ligatures turning "!=" into "≠" for example!

Character variants (Dotted zero, i, j, apostrophes)

Character variants help to increase reading speed and improve understanding of the code, particularly to avoid errors.

This mainly concerns signs that are very close to one another, in particular:

• The zero "0", which can be written with a dot or a slash through the middle to avoid confusing it with a capital "o"
• the "i" and the "j" clearly differentiated
• single quotes ' and double quotes " which very often look alike

It's thanks to all these variants that a font will make code more readable or not, here are 5 very useful examples!

Free fonts (4)

Microsoft Consolas

Link: https://www.freefonts.io/consolas-font/

IBM Plex Mono

Link: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Mono

Intel One Mono

Link: https://github.com/intel/intel-one-mono

Adobe Source Code Pro

Link: https://adobe-fonts.github.io/source-code-pro/

Premium fonts (1)

Berkeley Mono

Link: https://berkeleygraphics.com/typefaces/berkeley-mono/