Typefaces for Terminal and text editing

Many users on Twitter pointed out a new typeface designed for terminals and text editors called Hack. It looks nice but I thought I’d make a list of other useful open source typefaces:

  • Source Code Pro from Adobe is designed for code editing. This is my favorite and I have set it in Terminal and BBEdit. It has many different weights, italics, and also related typefaces Source Sans Pro and Source Serif Pro in case you want proportional typefaces as well. These are regularly updated with minor improvements and new glyphs.

  • Courier Prime is an improvement on the standard Courier typeface. There are also sans serif and code versions available.

  • Hack is the new typeface which inspired this post. The characters seem much larger than similar fonts at the same point size, but according to the page that is intentional.

Hack will be nice to have around, but for now Source Code Pro remains my favorite.

(If you, like me, are curious when to use ‘typeface’ vs ‘font’ then read this helpful article.)

Published by

ab

Mac Admin, Consultant, and Author

2 thoughts on “Typefaces for Terminal and text editing”

  1. May I also *highly* recommend PragmataPro. It’s not free, but it is a really well designed font that I have switched all of my boxes over to (Mac, Linux, *BSD) as much as possible. There’s a lower-cost “Essential” version as well. Since I spend so much time in a terminal, I went for it after using Essential for awhile. Works great with powerline-status and tmux as well.

Comments are closed.