Monday, March 10th, 2008 - 9:41 AM

Amnesia Programming Font

On Sunday I spent some time tweaking the font I usually use for programming (DejaVu Sans Mono) to make it work better for me. My version is called Amnesia Sans Mono (a reference to Stephen Wright‘s joke, “Right now I’m having amnesia and deja vu at the same time.”).

Here’s a sample at 24 point. Amnesia is on top, and DejaVu is on bottom.

24-point-amnesia-dejavu-comparison

Here they are at 8 point:

8-point-amnesia-dejavu-comparison

I made the top of the 1 more slanted, made the tails on the comma and semicolon more pronounced, and increased the size/readability of the asterisk, percent, less-than, and greater-than. These differences are subtle, but they help me.

Update (March 13, 2008): The images are slightly out of date. Since making them, I have restored some of the tail curve I had removed from the comma and semicolon, and I slightly tweaked the “1”.