A great way to end the year: ParaType releases a new, free, monospaced font: PT Mono
You can get it here: http://www.paratype.com/
Let’s take a look at some basic text. For the record, this text below from William Wordsworth has become my new person lorem ipsum placeholder text.
When from behind that craggy steep till then The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge, As if with voluntary power instinct, Upreared its head. I struck and struck again, And growing still in stature the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, for so it seemed with purpose of its own And measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me.
-William Wordsworth
The Prelude, lines 381-389
Overall, nice looking font for text. I like that it looks heaver than Courier New.
Now let’s look at some code.
The parenthesis are too rounded and when placed together form a distracting circle.
In a similar way, the square brackets form a little square.
I am also not a fan of the bottom curve in the lowercase “L”. It seems out of place in this typeface and reminds me of Ubuntu Mono.
Overall, I like PT Mono a lot. It does a good job with serifs – something that I miss in Consolas (my favorite coding font) and Lucida Console (my previous favorite).