The 15 Best Free Monospaced Fonts for Coding & Programming

Maybe you don’t give much thought to the font you currently use to code. You’re probably happy with the default monospaced font that comes with your favorite IDE, and over time, you’ve gotten used to it.

These fonts might be the best for you, but are they really good for general coding? I won’t tell you which font is good (currently, I’m using Ubuntu Mono Regular) or bad, because there’s no way to measure it categorically. It comes down to each coder’s preference. But there are some fonts available for free that are completely designed with programmers and coders in mind, you might want to consider.

With this post, I just wanted to highlight some of the best free monospace fonts optimized for programming and also offer some basic tips for choosing a particular font.

So what should you be looking for in a good monospaced programming font? First, it must be clear and highly legible, proportionally spaced, and for obvious reasons, it must be packaged with an expanded character set with recognizable glyphs. And perhaps more important than readability, the ‘1’, ‘i’ & ‘l’ and ‘o’, ‘0’ & ‘O’ must be clearly recognizable as different characters.