Jan 2, 2008

Font Fancy: 9x15

In the past few months, several folks have weighed in on their favorite fonts—Cory Doctorow waxed poetic about Droid Sans Mono while James Duncan Davidson professed his love for Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (His blog died, so the link is to a post about his post).

I've tried a lot of different fonts over the years, but I always come back to the most boring and plain screen font ever. It doesn't even have a real name--I know it only as "9x15" and it comes with X11. It's pretty much the only font I've ever coded in, and I've got my emacsen all hard-wired to use it, on both Mac and Linux. Click on the image below to see the full-size version (Stupid Blogger image upload insists on resizing my images).



I'd love to find an actual vector font that looks just like 9x15, but I've yet to find one, despite quite a bit of hunting.

4 comments:

Karl Fogel said...

Is it your favorite monospace font, or favorite font period?

Mine is 10x20, FWIW, which is qualitatively pretty similar to your 9x15, and I'm about a zillion times happier writing code in it than in anything else.

But I've always felt that monospace fonts and proportional fonts are, shall we say, separate magisteria, performing very different functions. I'd much rather read a book in a proportional font, but beyond that I don't have as strong an opinion about any proportional font as I do about 10x20 in monospace fonts.

Unknown said...

It's my favorite monospace font. I don't have really strong feelings on proportional fonts.

Eric Case said...

Isn't that also Monaco 9 (from Macs)? It's been my default font for many aeons... ;)

-E

Spiral of Hope said...

I too have been a long-time fan of 9x15. It's compact and readable.

I'm switching back to a font I found from DOSEmu - vga.pcf

It's as close to the actual terminal as I've seen any font come. Doesn't look good with bold fonts though, so those need to be disabled through the terminal, or just edit LS_COLORS.