Don't shoot the courier - or, maybe you should

Ever since there have been text editors, there has been the consideration of what font to use to display text. Fonts have progressed from a single choice to screen fonts (remember FIXEDSYS?) to TrueType to ClearType, and so have the choices of what to use (in the case of fixed-space fonts anyway).

First, there was Courier. Looks like a typewriter, everyone hates it for editing. I'm reminded of those days when you had to choose between a daisy-wheel printer (for corresponence quality text) and a dot-matrix printer (for graphics), although there were those booths at the local mall that would print an image on things like a calendar with typed characters...

Anyway, viewing code in Courier looked like this, if you remember (apologies for the large size but necessary for clear screen shots)

Awful! So most of us switched to a font called Lucida Console. Much smoother, and almost a pleasant experience, as you can see below.

Well, get ready to switch again. We've just released a new font pack called Consolas. It's really designed for code editing, taking advantage of the benefits of ClearType.

Below is a screenshot of Consolas. Note how the lines are spaced a bit farther apart, and the number zero has a slash through it. I love it!

So download Consolas now and enjoy...