What font do you use in your IDE?
Your choice of font can have a significant impact on the screen real estate that you’re left with when you’re programming, especially if you don’t have a monitor and video adapter that support a high resolution. The reason that the font is so important is that some fonts are more readable than others while taking the same amount or even less physical screen space. On the reccomendation of a colleague(thanks Neale) I’ve just switched to a font from www.proggyfonts.com. I now use proggy square (TTF & slashed zero) at font size 12. This gives me 77 lines in eclipse at 1280 x 1024 compared with the 55 lines using courier new at size 10 that I used to get. All, this without in my opinion anyway, increasing the strain on my eyes or reducing readability – very cool.
Some helpful info that points towards the importance of being able to see more on the screen at once – So you reduce the likelihood of losing your context when working with large slabs of code – Might be an idea to look for even more fonts that support the idea
Brendon
October 1, 2004 at 2:10 pm