Why use monospace fonts in your IDE? [closed]

Answer 1

Monospaced fonts make it much easier to line up code.

This is especially true when working with a team; everyone in the team can use different fonts, and as long as they're all monospaced, everything will line up. Similarly, if a single person uses many different development tools, everything will line up if they're all monospaced. If they weren't all monospaced, you'd have to make sure that they all use the same font, and if you're developing on two platforms, that can be difficult.

In fact, some development tools only support monospaced fonts.

Another reason is that monospaced fonts tend to have more distinct characters. Compare lIiO0 to lIiO0, and you'll see what I mean. They also make it much easier to count whitespace.

Answer 2

I think, just like the issue of tab characters, the complicating factor is when something is indented for the purposes of alignment, and someone else has different preferences. Things get misaligned.

Answer 3

Mostly for alignment purposes (such as when function parameter declarations span multiple lines and you want to line them up, or lining up comments, etc.).

Answer 4

I use Comic Sans MS, which looks quite reasonable as small point sizes (it only starts looking "jokey" at headline sizes). It's easy on the eyes, yet still keep the text small enough to have a reasonable amount of code visible in the text window, with several of VS's docked panels open.

You can have the Solution Explorer panel out, and still have 100 columns of text readable without horizontal scrolling. Moveover, I can have the DXCore Documentor panel (displaying formatted XMLDOCs) open wide enough to read while still being able to see enough of the text to doc the XMLdocs.

Answer 5

In a monospace font:

• Equal-length string literals look equal.
• It's easier to see thin punctuation marks like : () {}
• Similar characters look more different: Il 0O vs Il 0O
• You know whether or not a line will wrap on a window X characters wide. This means that your team can standardize on say 100 character lines and a line will always look like a line

Answer 6

I personally find the mono-spaced fonts easier to read in code editors. Of course, I'm almost blind. That might make a difference. I currently run consolas font at 15 point with a dark background with high-contrast letters.