This is going to be a quick post about a tiny detail that I feel makes for a big increase in happiness for a lot of people.

A lot of computer users, when using text editors or any other application that use monospaced (having the same width for every character, useful for programming and related tasks) fonts to render text (source code, plain text, e-mails, markup, etc.), stick with the default font. On some platforms, notably Mac OS X and most modern Linux distributions, this default font is a fairly reasonable and attractive typeface like Monaco or Monospace. On Windows XP and Vista, however, the default monospaced is Courier New.

Courier New, 10pt

Recently, Microsoft released several new fonts with its new operating system, Vista. One of these fonts is a monospaced font specifically designed for programming, called Consolas. This font, and a few other nice fonts, is available by default in Vista and Office 2007, and can also be downloaded as part of the Office Compatibility Pack for free.

Consolas, 10pt

Isn’t that better?

The only caveat is that Consolas is designed with ClearType font smoothing in mind, and if you do not have ClearType enabled, then things will look very ugly.