Consolas: the Coder's Font

Consolas is one of a set of new ClearType fonts that shipped as part of Windows Vista and Office 2007.

It's absolutely beautiful. I love to code in it.

The problem: no applications seem to be smart enough to use it by default. In this post, I'll go through all the places I use monospaced fonts

Visual Studio

Tools->Options->Environment->Fonts and Colors

Set "Plain Text" under "Display Items" to Consolas.

Firefox

Tools->Options

Under the Content tab, in the "Fonts & Colors" box, pick "Advanced". In Monospace, pick Consolas.

Internet Explorer

Tools->Internet Options

General tab, under Appearance, pick 'Fonts'.

Under "Plain text font:" pick Consolas.

.NET Reflector

View->Options

Under 'Appearance', 'Code Font': Consolas.

CMD.EXE

(Thanks to Walter for pointing this out to me.)

Yes, even the command window. If you're running Vista, make sure to run this command 'elevated'. You'll have to restart your machine before the setting takes effect.

reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont" /v 00 /d Consolas

Next, right click on the command window header and pick 'Properties'. You'll probably want to up the font size, too.

And there you go. All your most important applications using the nicest monospaced font.

Happy hacking!

Oleg, what's your email? (Contacting me via my blog.)

This has happened a few times, so I thought it would be worth mentioning.

1. I love comments. I try to blog more than "check out this link" posts. It takes a bit of work. Knowing folks are reading is great. But...
2. If you're saying more than "interesting post"--if you have comments or questions--please make sure I have a way to contact you.

Oleg Mihailik made an interesting comment about my NotifyWorker post:

As long as you are already using the delegates, you can use closures (local variables) instead of creating artifical types to hold them.

Then you'd have to provide 2 parameterless delegates: one for work item and another for 'OnCompleted' logic on GUI thread.

That simplifies out the packaged parameters' class, AND eliminates the exception catching work by design.

If they care enough to handle exceptions, they'd do it in conventional and readable way: by enclosing the dangerous part in try/catch. And then, they can reflects it in exactly the same 'OnCompleted' delegate.

I have questions for him and I have no clue how to drop him a line.

If you'd like to chat (or talk job offers) please send me an email.

My obfuscated address--edeya9902(at)sneakemail(dot)com--in the left pane, is meant as a test. If you can't figure it out or don't want to go through the effort of doing the manual copy-paste-replace, we probably shouldn't chat.

Or if you post a comment, just make sure you link back to a blog with a contact page. That's more than sufficient.

Thanks.