Consolas Font in Vista

Date Published: 10 September 2007

Consolas Font in Vista

I've recently been experimenting with other fonts for Visual Studio on Vista after reading this article on new fonts in Vista. I think I like Consolas better than Courier New for coding, if only for its novelty. It also tends to be a little bit more compact than Courier New at the same font size, which is nice to keep long lines from wrapping. Have a look at the difference, see what you think:

Consolas Font, 10 pt:

Courier New Font, 10 pt:

As you can see, the Consolas Font is a fair bit narrower horizontally than Courier New, and I don't find it particularly harder to read, so I really like that. Horizontal space is always at a premium – one place this is very true is in book code examples — perhaps some publishers will look to use Consolas for their code listings, which would make it much easier for authors as we wouldn't need to worry about line wrapping quite as much as we do now.

Steve Smith

About Ardalis

Software Architect

Steve is an experienced software architect and trainer, focusing on code quality and Domain-Driven Design with .NET.