[Haskell-cafe] tangential request...

[Evan Laforge]

>> Inconsolata and Consolas?
>
> My bet:
>
> - Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
> - DejaVu Sans Mono
> - Inconsolata
> - Whatever the default terminal font is on OS X

A bit of a tangent, but a while back I tried a bunch of those
recommended programmer fonts, and I didn't like any of them better
than the default OS X terminal font.  I recall the problems were
mostly that they tended to no longer fit 80 columns into my "3 tiled
terminals" layout and some had oddities like underscore sticking out
below the row or zero not being slashed, but then there was a whole
family of things that I was just not used to.  So the default was more
readable simply because I'm used to it.  Maybe all fonts are like
that, once you get past the objective basic requirements.

Also, more on topic, what's the ratio of dark fg bright bg to bright
fg dark bg?  Looking around at work, light-on-dark seems more common,
to the point where usually I have to figure out how to disable the
colorization people seem to like on internal tools because they tend
to be unreadable on my dark-on-light terminals (and for whatever
reason I can't stand garish syntax highlighting).  But then looking
around most people use the stock ubuntu terminal emulator with the
default colors, so maybe they're only light-on-dark because they don't
care enough to customize.  Those same people seem equally happy to use
the dark-on-light default in Eclipse.  But I guess haskellers
are less likely to stick with defaults, as demonstrated by their
choice of language :)

There's an interesting tension here between "pick anything reasonable
and get used to it" vs. "actively search for your personal best", that
actually applies to so many things in life...