Unauthoritative Pronouncements

Last night there was some back and forth about fonts for writing, and fonts for terminals, and then the color of the background and the text, etc. It was a lot. I didn’t need to inject myself into that conversation so I did some selective favoriting. This morning Jason Snell wrote a little more about it and shared a site (via Leo Laporte) where you do a little tournament bracket between a set of monospace fonts. None of the monospace fonts in the bracket are what I use, but I came out of it with Source Code Pro, for whatever that says about my taste.

The truth is that I use several different monospace fonts, and display styles, that are app specific. I’m not someone that sets the same thing everywhere. That can seem strange but I find that some fonts seem to look better in certain apps, or that some fonts work better for me when I’m doing a particular task and it sets a context for my brain.

iA Writer: iA Writer Mono Drafts: Monaspace Argon Var BBEdit: Monaspace Argon Terminal: Monaco

As for theming, everything is white on black, except BBEdit and Terminal. BBEdit is just the standard Light Theme with its white, blues, and purples. My Terminal is “Homebrew” which is green text on a very slightly transparent black background. I’m also a cyberspace cowboy.

I don’t mess with fonts on iOS, so that version of Drafts just coasts on system defaults and it’s fine for a smaller screen.

I used to use Sublime Text, with Solarized Light and Dark themes, and when I worked on a Windows machine at work I had Solarized Dark in Notepad++, but unless Solarized is built in I don’t fiddle around with settings at that level because it takes too much time and I never get it quite right.

There are no wrong answers, of course, since it’s just whatever gets stuff out of your brain and makes you productive. So don’t waste too much time tweaking everything. Get it to where you can work on whatever it is you’re doing, and you can tell when you’ve reached that point because you stop opening the app’s settings. You can always change it later, it’s not like you’re declaring yourself to be a sports team fan and making it your identity when you pick this crap.