The best Monospace fonts for Coding

Monospace fonts allocate an equal amount of space to each character, so a letter 'i' will take up the same horizontal space as an 'o'. This creates unnatural spacing which makes a paragraph of flowing text harder to read, so for most applications, proportional fonts – which allow characters to take up the space they need – are usually preferable.

If you want to make your coding life even easier, check out our posts on the best code editors and the best laptops for programming.

1. Fira Code

Fira Code is an extension of Fira Mono, a monospaced font designed for Mozilla to fit in with the character of Firefox OS. The coding variant of Fira includes programming ligatures – these are special renderings of certain character combinations that are designed to make code easier to read and understand.

How you feel about this, of course, depends on personal taste – if you’ve been reading normal code for years you might not want to make the change. But if this does appeal, Fira Code is a widely supported, popular programming font that makes code easy to read. It's also free and open source. The GitHub page has coding samples from a range of languages so you can see how things look.

2. Input Mono

Input is a system of fonts designed specifically for coding by David Jonathan Ross that comes in both proportional and monospaced variants. As it has been designed with coding in mind, the proportional spacing is tailored to that application so it may be that you will consider it over the monospaced version.

There’s a range of widths, weights, and styles, each with serif, sans and monospaced variants, resulting in a total of 168 different styles. So you really can get exactly what you want with this font set. Input is free to use for private, unpublished usage in your personal coding app. If you want to publish text using something from the Input font family.

3. Dank Mono

Dank Mono by Phil Plückthun, bills itself as being "designed for aesthetes with code and Retina displays in mind". Like Fira Code, it has the programming ligatures, and there’s also a cursive italic variant that’s useful for distinguishing different types of text within your code. 

Overall this font has been created for coders who have an eye for design, and the unusual lowercase 'f' is known for being particularly beloved among Dank fans. Dank supports the Western, Eastern, Central, and Southern European Latin character sets, and you can use it within CodePen.

To get Dank, you'll need to pay – a personal license is £40 and a commercial one is £100. But if you’re a type connoisseur and you’re smitten with that jaunty 'f' it might be worth treating yourself to some Dankness.

4. Gintronic

Creator Mark Frömberg describes Gintronic as "jovial" and "gentle", an antidote to what he sees as the overly technical and mechanical style of many programming fonts. Gintronic overall appears relaxed and easy to look at, with a few particular characters adding a special personality – check out the curly brackets, the question mark, the lower case ‘k’ and the numerals. Extra effort has been made to design glyphs that can be hard to tell apart – such as 'B' and '8', 'i'’ and 'l' and so on – in a way that makes them easy to distinguish at a glance.

In total there are 1174 glyphs, so Gintronic has a massive character set that includes Latin, Cyrillic and Greek characters as well as a full range of mathematical and technical symbols.

5. Monoid

Andreas Larsen set out a list of priorities when he designed Monoid – he wanted it to be legible, compact (the more code you can fit on one screen, the better), and "pretty". To achieve these ends he compared three other programming fonts – Fira Mono, Source Code Pro, and Pragmata Pro – and took note of features that he likes and doesn’t like from each to inform the design of Monoid.

Like many programming fonts, Monoid has extra-large punctuation marks and operators; apertures are large to help make characters more distinguishable, and ascenders and descenders are kept short. Smart design decisions have been taken to make Monoid both compact and highly legible.

6. Hack

Among the fonts we’ve covered so far, there are some with huge character sets and several variants, so it’s likely you’ll find something that’s just right. But if you have very specific desires, Hack could be the one for you, as there’s a whole library of alternative glyphs made by users that you can add to if you like. The hack is therefore highly customizable – you can get right down into the detail of each glyph and edit it yourself if no one else has done it exactly as you want.

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