After I mentioned on Found on the Web the plethora of free fonts available over at Dinctype, I found the perfect coding font: ProFont.
It’s free and available for both Macintosh and Windows in either bitmap or TrueType format. It’s a monospaced font that looks great at 8pt Mac or 9pt Windows. The screenshot is 29 lines of code that I’m working on today. My VisualStudio.NET window can now hold about 48 lines of text versus 35 previously using Andale Mono (still a very nice font, but you need to be around 10pt for it to look decent). The more text in the window, the better.
I know there are some of you out there thinking, “Umm, vi/emacs can display 120 lines of text in its windows.” I’m sympathetic, but I have to use VS.NET in my development. Have you ever tried to do ASP.NET development without using VisualStudio.NET? I did because of my affection for jEdit, but there comes a time when you have to give up since you’re spending more time wrestling with compiling and deploying your page than you are developing it. Microsoft lock-in is a bitch, but what are you going to do? The options are memory-sucking and feature-poor.
Oh and if you’ve noted that I’m working on a Saturday, it’s because the project’s in full swing now and I’ve got to work about 12-15 hours of overtime a week to be able to keep up with the aggressive schedule. And I know some of you are thinking, “12-15 hours of overtime? I do that every two days. I’m working 137 hours a week.” To that I say, “Sucks to be you. Get a better job.”