Every once in a while, I'll see some article on Digg about programming font alternatives and I'll find myself thinking, "is that really necessary?" I've been around programming for the last four or five years, and in all that time I've never once moved away from the default Windows IDE font.

For those of you who've never touched programming in a computer language, most programming integrated development environments (IDE) are set to use the monospaced Courier New font. Created in 1955 for typewriters, this font eventually found its way into Windows operating systems as far back as Windows 95. The strength in this font and many of the other monospaced fonts is that the characters all line up vertically. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

I've compared Courier New to Times New Roman because TNR is widely known as a popular font for word processors. As you can see from the guide lines in the image, all the characters typed in Courier New (the monospaced font) line up, while the characters typed in Times New Roman do not. A benefit to monospacing characters in code is that its possible to easily compare the content of various lines of code. If I want to compare a MySQL database connection string from one file to a similar string in another file, I can just copy-paste the two strings and compare their string length to check for any inconsistencies or differences between the two. With a font like Courier New you'll notices character differences between strings almost immediately.

Since I started coding, I've tried to switch fonts once or twice. I stayed away from TrueType fonts because I liked the look of monospaced characters, but finding a monospaced font I like was difficult. Every time I tried a different font, I thought the text was too small or the characters were too blocky. SOME monospaced fonts even boasted a special tiny size, as though I liked coding at size five font. No matter which font I tried, though, I ALWAYS moved back to Courier New. Call it stubborness, call it security, but I had found my favorite programming font a long time ago.

I suppose the perfect programming font is determined solely by personal preference. Personal experience tells me that, for a word document, non-monotype-fonts such as TNR are perfect because they set up words that look more naturally-spaced, similar to how someone would write. When it comes down to programming, monospace fonts are the way to go because of how neat the code looks easy it is to compare various bits of code. Just my two cents.