A lot of people new to programming just hate the fact that they have to used fixed width fonts. Personally, I also hate most fixed width fonts, but have always liked Monaco 10, which just so happens to be the default fixed width font in OS X:

However, one thing about fixed width fonts: they look drastically different at different sizes. Here’s Monaco 11, for example:

It just feels so much w i d e r, which makes reading chunks of text difficult, IMO. Anti-aliasing also comes on by default at 11 for Monaco, which makes the font look fat and fuzzy, especially on a dark background like this (which is how I like it). Turning anti-aliasing off doesn’t help: Monaco 11 looks nasty and jagged that way:

Most of the time, this isn’t a problem: for most tasks, I like Monaco 10 just fine. For reading and writing code, I find it nice & crisp and easy to look at:

Writing papers is a different matter though. It’s a different kind of reading and writing and I find Monaco 10 is often just too small in these cases, especially as I like to stretch out on the couch with the laptop in my lap, which puts it pretty far away from my eyes:

And, as I already mentioned above, even bumping it up 1 pt size just makes it ugly:

The fuzziness and the wideness, while not a huge problem with code, is a big deal when you’re reading paragraphs of text at a time. It’s just too hard to read. And so I’ve been searching like crazy through collections of fixed width fonts. I think I finally found one I like, though I’ve got to work with it for awhile before I decide for sure. Lekton 14 (download link):

It’s big, but narrow & not as fuzzy as Monaco at big sizes. It would drive me crazy to look at that php code above in this font, but for writing things like papers and dissertations in LaTeX, it seems to work quite well.

By the way, to make MacVim (or any GUI Vim, I’d guess) use this font only when opening LaTeX files (and defaulting to Monaco 10 for all other files), these two lines do the trick in ~/.gvimrc:

set gfn=Monaco:h10
autocmd FileType tex set gfn=Lekton04-Thin:h14.00

Okay, I’ve now had my fill of taking screenshots and obsessing over fonts. Time to actually get some writing done.