Peter Cooper

Liberation Mono - Ultimate Coding / Source Code Font

There have been a few Twitter messages about various “coding fonts” today, so I thought I’d put up a little demo of Liberation Mono (or download the tarball directly). I’ve used Bitstream Vera Sans, Inconsolata, Consolas, and a few others, but Liberation has proven to be streets ahead of any of those for both its neutrality and elegance. It’s also under the LGPL so is “truly free” in many respects.

Liberation Mono at 13 pt:

Liberation Mono at 11 pt:

No idea what it’s like without anti-aliasing, as I don’t roll that way.

But.. it has one flaw that may well be fatal for some programmers who don’t use syntax coloring. Zeroes and the letter O are somewhat indistinguishable. Typically a non-issue if you have syntax coloring, but could be a deal breaker. I’m willing to put with it, although it’d have been great if the zero had a dot in the middle or something.. but the font’s LGPL so it’s possible to hack it.

Thanks to Matt Pruitt for encouraging me to actually link directly to the downloadable files.

Looks nice, could use a little more leading for my taste, but its a nice change of pace from Bitstream Vera Mono. Also, I should note that I have a dotted 0 (zero) in mine, maybe it was updated?

Thanks for the tip! I’ve been a Consolas guy for the most part, but I’m always on the lookout for something better.

Mr. Cooper,

Lately I have been reading you book, Beginning Ruby, and I have a few questions about Ruby in general. I am only on chapter 4 so I am not an expert yet. First, how do I keep the terminal from closing very quickly after running a program using SciTE. I figured out how to do this with the programming language Python: rawinput(Press ), but I have not been able to keep the terminal up long enough so as to see the program clearly or type something into it (reply = gets.chomp).
Second, I get this error message when I am using FreeRIDE as you do in chapter 4: *** WARNING *** Windows users should check the “Run process in terminal” check box in the Debugger Preferences to see STDOUT and STDERR output in real time. What should I do about that?
Also, when I do the first step I get the right answer (121) lines in Oliver Twist, but when I try and count the characters in the next step all I get is (121).

If anyone has any tips on how to help me please let me know.
Thanks for taking to time to read this.
- Andrew

Great programming font. What TextMate theme are you using in those screen captures?

If you’re going to look at your screen all day, it might as well look nice!!

I use consolas at work on Windows, and whatever the default Textmate font is at home, on the Mac, but I’ll be switching to this one pretty soon I can tell you!!

http://abduzeedo.com/coolest-font-ever

Stuart: I double dare you to use that as your main font for a whole day

Ethan: Unsure, although I /thought/ it was the default because I’m not big into customization. I’ll have a look when I’m back on that machine and post again

If only there were a download link Peter

Here’s the download link for those who don’t want to click through several pages.

https://www.redhat.com/f/fonts/liberation-fonts.tar.gz

sudo apt-get install ttf-liberation

That does it for Ubuntu 8.04 anyway.

To install the tarball on Linux (Ubuntu in particular), extract the *.ttf font files to /usr/share/fonts, and run

sudo fc-cache -f -v

in the terminal to update your font cache.

nice fonts, mate! but too bad this font suck when I type ‘->’. Somehow the arrow is not in the center of the line (or the line position maybe too low) …

anyway … really nice and clean …

for it to work
i had to copy *.ttf files under /usr/share/fonts/truetype

I’d forgotten how beautiful Liberation Mono was — thanks for the reminder. I switched to Monaco this year because the big O vs zero was simply too annoying when it came up. But looking at your screenshots I feel like going back to that fat Liberation Mono font… big is beautiful!

Perhaps I’m just seeing things, but I just downloaded/installed this font to try it out, and there is a distinct dot in the number 0 that isn’t there with the letter O.

Nice font for sure, but at 11pt Deja Vu Sans Mono is still my favorite (http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/)

The Fedora versions have a dotted zero:

https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/i/liberation-fonts/