One Geek’s Aesthetics
I’m a fussy guy when it comes to fonts. I like them a certain way because I have strong opinions about which fonts look good and because I spend a lot of time throughout the day looking at them. I like being an avid reader, a software developer and a guy with 20/20 vision. As a result I spend more time than most fiddling with the fonts on my machine to get them just so.
At work I have a MacBook Pro hooked up to a large Dell flat-screen LCD monitor. The screen real estate is fantastic, but it has a weird effect on my terminal program. Here’s a snapshot of what the Monaco font looks like when I start iTerm (or Terminal.app) while attached to the Dell:
Here’s a screenshot of what iTerm looks like when I launch it without the Dell attached:
See how much thicker the letters are in the second shot? I much prefer the latter setup because it’s easier on my eyes. Also I find the variation in the thickness of the lines (probably a result of anti-aliasing with the Dell) in the first screenshot distracting. But that’s just my font-related OCD kicking in. It bugs me enough that if I have to start iTerm again, I’ll unplug the Dell, wait for my Mac to figure out I have one screen, relaunch iTerm and then plug the monitor back in. Yup, it matters that much to me.
It seems stereotypical that dudes who write Ruby on Macs love big fonts. Meeting other Ruby dudes with Macs was certainly my first exposure to terminals set to 18-point type. Before then I felt like 14 was pushing it. But then I realized that there really isn’t that much I can look at at once. I used to be one of those guys that would get four terminals going simultaneously in 10-point type. Just look at me, I’d think to myself, I am soooooo productive. Now I’m on the other side of the fence. I’m a big-font guy.
In part this is because I know that I can get distracted too easily. Having a bunch of stuff open at once only opens me up to more opportunities for something to steal my attention. These days I really don’t need to exacerbate my ADD so cutting down on what I have to look at is generally a good thing. I’ve actually returned to using virtual desktops just to partition my running applications. Oh yeah, I turn off all those notifications too. It was fun for awhile, but now it’s just irritating.
I like to keep the fonts pretty big. I don’t like reading from a screen nearly as much as I like reading from paper. I can feel a sort of mental fatigue set in after reading too much online. One way I’ve found to combat that fatigue is to simply increase the font-size. Honestly I can’t read five paragraphs at once…I can read only read one so I really don’t need to cram a bunch in a single space.
I think I’m not alone in my preference for big bold, stripped-down fonts. I’ve seen an increasing number of web applications that go with a real stark, big-font look. One of my favorites is GitHub:
I think it’s pretty clear what you’re supposed to do here. Very little extraneous BS, just direct to the point. Give them a login and a password, they’ll give you GitHub. It couldn’t possibly be any simpler. Oftentimes you see the login box relegated to a corner of the screen with the remaining 80-90% devoted to some kind of market-ese with stock photos of trim, athletic, happy people who are ostensibly using the same product. What a total waste of space.
Size isn’t my only bone to pick with fonts. I’m also quite particular about which faces I like. In general I’m not a big fan of serif fonts. I find the clutter of the extra lines distracting, so I generally stick to sans-serif fonts as much as possible. Among sans-serif fonts I have two favorites: Monaco for fixed-width and Gill Sans for variable width.
Fixed-width fonts are popular in programming because the code just lays out better to our eyes. It could be that with things like blocks and indentation, programmesr have a natural tendency to scan code horizontally and vertically in rows and columns. Vertical scanning would be much more problematic with a variable-width font.
However for general reading, I like Gill Sans as a variable-width font. I like it so much that whenever I setup a new desktop, I go fiddle with the font settings in Firefox to get ‘em the way I like ‘em. I even go so far as to trump a site’s stylesheets just to keep my font. Sometimes this results in pretty weird looking pages, but more often than not it turns out okay.
However, I realize that not everyone likes the same font I do. Because I do some web development I need to be able to view sites the same way as the poor unwashed masses view them. For that I take advantage of Firefox’s profiles which allow me to have my font-fascist settings for general browsing and factory default font-settings for testing.
So there it is. I like big fonts and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Sure it might look like I’m reading the code-equivalent of the large-print section from the library. But hey, I still have great vision and you small-font people aren’t processing any more at once than I am.
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One Response to “One Geek’s Aesthetics”
March 26th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Yea on reading prose, nay on reading/writing code.
Prose reads sequentially, so it’s very easy to anticipate scrolling needs in advance. So there’s no reason not to optimize for reduced squint. This is why it’s sweet that FF3 resizes images with text. Anything wider than 80 columns is likely to be hard to read, so unless you figure out a way to get your browser to do vertical splits like Emacs or GNU Screen, you’re going to waste a lot of space on either side of the text.
But it’s very rare that you progress sequentially through code. Because of this, having as much on the screen as you can is a major productivity boon. You never know when you’re going to have to jump up or down in a file to read the definition of a method that is being called. And that kind of ad-hoc scrolling (especially the unpredictable jumps caused by incremental search) is a lot harder for your brain to anticipate in advance, so it has to reorient itself every time you make those jumps.
Also, it’s my experience that serifs are distracting on lower-resolution displays, but they blend a lot better in high DPI situations. (Like, oh… paper?) You probably don’t mind them as much on your iPhone. I know when I’m reading a PDF (and the reader has a much more advanced rendering engine than browsers do) on my high-res tablet it is much more enjoyable than reading serif fonts in a regular browser on a ~72 DPI display. The more subtlety a rendering is capable of, the less annoying serifs are, since they are really just subtle details.
For your terminal woes you could try out a bitmap font. I find Terminus to be excellent for that kind of thing, and you don’t have to deal with anti-aliasing issues.
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