bright static

While I haven’t been programming for that long, it’s been long enough that I should have thought more about what font I use in my IDE. Recently though I installed JSEclipse which wanted to use some really horrible default. I went in to change it back to normal and realized I didn’t know what my “normal” font setting was. I just used whatever the IDE gave me. I don’t think I can fully describe how bizarre this realization was, since as a power user that spends many hours in front of a code editor every day it never occurred to me to set it to something more desirable.

At any rate, now that I’ve been enlightened I set eclipse to use 11pt Andale Mono. I found it in the accepted answer of a stackoverflow question on the topic. There are, of course, many other options. Even after a few weeks to adjust I still look at my code and think, “Wow, that just looks so nice.” This is a completely new emotion, to look at source code and find it visually appealing. Code formatting certainly comes into play there as well, but the addition of a well-designed font increases its appeal by at least one order of magnitude.