«
»

Consolas: Visual Studio’s Hidden Gem

Out of the box, Visual Studio uses the Courier New font for displaying code. While that’s an acceptable font for programming, it’s hardly modern or easy on the eye. Did you know that Microsoft supply a much more readable alternative, for free?

Courier New has been around since 1955 – and that it’s been around so long is a testament to its readability. However since then, display technology has radically changed – I’d be amazed if you weren’t reading this article on some form of TFT panel, and if using Windows, with ClearType enabled.

Enter Consolas.  For the release of Office 2007, Microsoft commissioned a set of modern fonts, designed to be highly readable on screens that use ClearType: Calibri, Candara, Cambria, Consolas, Constantia and Corbel. Of that set, Consolas makes an excellent monospaced code font.

Here’s Courier New:

Courier New Example

And here’s Consolas:

Consolas Example

To my eyes, that’s a big improvement. You’ll notice as well that Consolas is slightly narrower, enabling you to fit a bit more text on the screen.

So where can you get it?

If you have Visual Studio, you can download it directly from Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=22e69ae4-7e40-4807-8a86-b3d36fab68d3&displaylang=en

Or if not, it comes as part of the free Powerpoint viewer:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=048DC840-14E1-467D-8DCA-19D2A8FD7485&displaylang=en

submit to reddit

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 11:44 am and is filed under Coding, Opinion, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

12 Responses to “Consolas: Visual Studio’s Hidden Gem”

  1. I personally use Inconsolata [ http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html ], I find it much nicer on the eyes than Consolata is, and is also free.

  2. You should try Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Best programmer’s font, esp. for dark backgrounds.

  3. David A. Rogers on April 16th, 2009 at 4:58 pm

    There are a lot better programming fonts out there than consolas. Take a look at the proggy fonts for instance. Programming fonts need to be crisp at small sizes. Consolas is too fuzzy at small point sizes.

  4. Also Consolas comes with Windows Vista. No download required.

  5. @Ben Woodward

    THANK YOU! I have been using Consolas on all my linux distributions, and the link you posted is a life saver. Consolas is a very lovely programming font, too bad its not free.

  6. Ben Woodward – The page you link to….links to “programmer fonts,” which is infected with HTML:Iframe-inf virus.

  7. I would say your assumptions about the cleartype are the reason it’s not enabled by default. On XP especially lots of people don’t use cleartype. It looks bad on my monitor and it looks bad on my laptop. However, it looks good on my bigger monitor so I do use it there.

  8. From those images i prefer courier new. It looks much clearer

  9. Yeah, Courier definitely looks a lot smoother and cleaner.

  10. I really like the Proggy fonts, but currently I like using Envy Code R. It has a “VS” Visual Studio variant that maps the “bold” face to italic so that you can italicize elements.

  11. Consolas: Visual Studio’s Hidden Gem great article thank you.

  12. Consolas: Visual Studio’s Hidden Gem great article thank you.

Leave a Reply