Free alternative to Consolas font

Consolas is my favorite monospace font. It’s a good programmer’s font because it exaggerates the differences between some characters that may easily be confused. It ships with Visual Studio and with many other Microsoft products. See this post for examples.

I recently found out about Inconsolata, a free font similar to Consolas. Inconsolata is part of the OFL font collection from SIL International.

Another interesting font from SIL is Andika, mentioned previously here. The Andika home page describes this font as follows.

Andika is a sans serif, Unicode-compliant font designed especially for literacy use, taking into account the needs of beginning readers. The focus is on clear, easy-to-perceive letterforms that will not be readily confused with one another.

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6 thoughts on “Free alternative to Consolas font

  1. Inconsolata is lovely and quite crisp, thanks for the recommendation. It’s great for xterm, and it’s available in the Ubuntu repository, for those interested.

  2. I have used DejaVu Sans Mono since it became available, and I think it’s an excellent monospace programmer’s font. All the commonly confused characters such as oO0Ø and 1l|¦ look very different from each other, the font looks great at small font sizes, and it has extensive Unicode coverage.

  3. Is it the font or just the shitty linux ? I tried 3hrs to install the font – which failed.

  4. Andika is not a monospace font, so it’s not as good as Inconsolata or DejaVu for programming.

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