It’s 2 AM.

Your eyes are blurring over.

Thousands of lines of code seem to blend together. And even after you switch off your laptop, you still have a pounding headache.

Sound familiar?

It may be time to try a new font.

if you’re not getting these symptoms, a well-designed font often offers superior readability over the default system fonts.

Here are the best free programming fonts to reduce eyestrain and enhance readability. Feel free to download them and check them out!

1. Fira Code

The concept behind Fira Code is simple: The monospaced font is designed to combine those frequently used multi-symbol sequences into one, reducing the time it takes to scan over your code and find what you’re looking for.

For example, the not equals symbol (!=) turns into one equals symbol with a slash through it, the opening and closing symbols in HTML (</) are spaced closer together, and so on. These ligatures exist for many programming languages.

And this doesn’t change any of the underlying characters themselves, or how they look so it won’t impact your code. It just makes it easier to read!

There are also some character variants so you can fine-tune the font how you like it.

Fira Code is supported by most browsers, and you can see how it looks in the real-world code examples they provide.

2. JetBrains Mono

If you use a JetBrains IDE, you may be familiar with this font. And if not, then you’ll want to try it out. It’s made specifically for developers and optimized for reading large volumes of code.

JetBrains Mono comes packed with nearly 140 code ligatures, 8 weights each with italics, and support for 145 languages. It’s also open-source and available for use in any personal or commercial situation.

3. DejaVu Sans Mono

The DejaVu fonts were designed to cover the Unicode character set in its entirety, and while that goal hasn’t quite been reached, the coverage is far more vast than most other fonts provide.

DejaVu Sans Mono also follows this principle, but of course, it’s a monospaced font suitable for development. The readability and distinguished characters make it a good choice for programmers.

4. Source Code Pro

Adobe has published several open-source fonts in their Source Sans family, and this one is monospaced and made explicitly for UI. Though the regular weight will work for most programming applications, a range of weights is available if you need them.

While this font is pretty similar to Source Sans, it had a few changes to better suit coders: optimized symbols, dotted zero, modified “i,” “j,” and “l,” and more.

5. Dina

Dina is a clear and cleanly-designed font that makes code more readable and causes fewer headaches.

This version is remastered from the original, converted to TTF, and updated to remove artifacts. Unlike other attempts, this is probably the most high-quality and complete conversion.

Summary

When your job is looking at a screen all day, you owe it to yourself to choose a font that won’t leave you with splitting headaches when the workday is over. Or maybe you’re just looking for something a little more unique and fun than the same old fonts you’ve been using for over a decade.

Want more font options? Check out even more easy-on-the-eyes options here: https://kinsta.com/blog/best-programming-fonts/