David Jonathan Ross is a type designer who makes fonts, including Input, a font family built for programming.
Commenters recommend Input, including Input Sans as a proportional coding font, though one points out its license is not free.
This situation is beginning to improve if you know where to look. There are several typeface designers who offer both low prices and reasonable licensing terms for their fonts; for instance, David Jonathan Ross (https://djr.com/) has a "Font of the Month Club" that gives you one font per month at $6/month; even without membership you can get previous club fonts for $24; and the licensing terms are plain english. Matthew Butterick's fonts cost more ($120 for a full typeface; mbtype.com) but have a very reasonable plain-English license.
That said, usage tiers (where you must pay more if your website gets a certain # of views/month) seem ubiquitous. I think these are ok - big websites can afford to pay more, and I wouldn't be surprised if a disproportionate amount of a typeface designer's income will come from a few heavy hitters; so without charging more for big websites, they'd have to raise the price for small ones, pricing hobbyists like me out of the market. Big font companies, though, often require you to install intrusive javascript tracking code to enforce these agreements, which is a step too far for me.
Fonts are pretty much a pure crystallization of the "information wants to be free"/"artists want to be paid" tradeoff. Digital fonts are nothing but information, so it seems absurd to charge more for using them on more websites/in more documents/with a larger team - there's no additional cost being incurred!; but without artificial restrictions on reuse, typeface…
If the Input Mono Condensed you're referring to comes from https://djr.com/input/ I recommend reviewing that font's license.
https://djr.com/license/ is a non-free license (the license does not respect your software freedoms to run, copy, share, and modify the software). The license is revocable under unclear and incompletely specified conditions: This license can be terminated at any time for no declared reason "without the obligation of notice or opportunity to cure [a breach of any term of this agreement]". The license tries to place limits that could go beyond what power copyright law grants in Massachusetts, USA (the region the license will be interpreted within). In other words, copyright law in your region may grant you more rights than the state of Massachusetts, USA grants.
Great idea. However, I think that it misses the educational part. Choosing a font should be preceded by learning certain characteristics of fonts that help to read code.
For example, the font Input[1] might not be the most aesthetically pleasing, but it is one of the very few non-monospace developer fonts. The website of this font explains the idea behind it in a way that convinced me.
Maybe it could be done by using a wizard/tutorial to narrow down the fonts list.
[1] https://djr.com/input
The Input font family by David Jonathan Ross focuses on monospace programming fonts, but it also contains a nice sans-serif font that kind of has a similar aesthetic. I’m not a typeface person, so I know I’m not explaining it very well. The homepage has tons of samples if you scroll down: https://djr.com/input
It’s one of my favorite fonts for code, but I also used Input Sans as a font for writing in Obsidian and Ulysses for a while. It was very good!
Completely agree.
Personally, I've decided not to buy a font anymore if it doesn't have a "Universal" license that encompasses all uses at once.
I want to be able to use the font however I see fit and not feel FOMO'd in buying a Desktop+Web license because what if I ever want to use it on the web might as well get the discount now. Wait now I can't use it in an app ! Damn.
Example: DJR licensing is awesome [1]
[1] https://djr.com/license
I’ve used Input Sans[1] with Python in the past and it works pretty well except if you use white space for formatting or ascii art as opposed to just indenting.
It works because the spaces are nice and wide unlike in a typical proportional font.
I don’t use it anymore mostly because I wanted something with a little more character but it’s worth a try.
[1]: https://djr.com/input/