A bunch of people pointed out Dan Benjamin’s recent article on his top 10 programming fonts. He rated Inconsolata as his favorite font, with Consolas as a close second. I generally use Monaco, the standard monospace font shipped with every Mac, but I’d played with Inconsolata a bit in the past. I really like it, but for some reason, it requires setting the point size a few ticks higher (15pt vs 12pt for Monaco) for some reason.
Raph Levien, the gentleman who developed the font, has graciously made it available for free, both the font file and the actual code used to generate it in Font Forge. I pulled down the source and re-exported the font, and for whatever reason, the font size appears to be consistent with Monaco now. How odd.
While I was poking around, I noticed a few things I didn’t like in the punctutation characters, so I spent a couple hours and tweaked things around until I had them where I liked them. I figure some other folks might like the changes, so I’ve released my changes as a new font, Termes. It’s also under the Open Font license, and you can track my changes and submit bugs over on bitbucket.
Hope you like it, and thanks to Raph for all the hard work coming up with this font in the first place.