Does anyone know which monospace font in the Terminal program or iTerm is the best to use at very small font sizes?
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My choice would generally be Lucida Grande or Anadale Mono; Some days I'm more in the mood for Monaco though too. If my eyes start getting tired I ditch the small fonts for a few days if possivle. Depending on the shell I'm running, I've had Anadale Mono cranked all the way down to 5 point and still readable (provided I have access to an electron microscope as backup).
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This depends somewhat on your definition of "best" and "very small size," but at 9 or 10 points, I'd have to give a shout out to Monaco, one of the fonts from the original Mac. The font is bitmapped so it is specifically designed to be readable at 9 and 10 points (that said, Terminal doesn't take advantage of the bitmapped 9-point Monaco, and scales the vector version instead -- I don't know what iTerm does. You can tell the difference because the bitmapped 9-point Monaco has a rounded capital A, but the bitmapped 10-point has a pointy A.). In general, a bitmapped font well crafted for a particular number of pixels will display better at that size than a scaled vector font. Getting smaller than that, Monaco loses its edge. Subjectively, I find Menlo, the default Terminal font in OS X Snow Leopard and beyond, to be much more readable at 6 point than any of the other monospaced fonts on my system.
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Inconsolata-dz at 7pt is still legible to me on my MacBook Air (1440 x 900 x 32) in iTerm, if I use anti-aliasing. I'm not saying that I'd actually choose to use it for any length of time, but if I had to… I could. |
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