Why I like monospaced fonts

Yesterday, I read Kev Quirk’s post titled Some of My Favourite Fonts, responding to a post by Matt Birchler on Mastodon, and it got me thinking about what would be my own favourite fonts.

As much as it surprises me, I don’t think I actually have a favourite font.

I can — very easily — make a list of the typefaces I don’t like (Roboto, Calibri, and Arial being at the top of my list, hands down), but I’d struggle to name fonts that I love.

Obviously, I have a lot of respect for classic typefaces like Helvetica, Avenir, or Futura, but I don’t see myself using them for anything that I do. This website used to be set in Avenir or Avenir Next, but I eventually got tired of it, and while it sure looks pretty, it wasn’t the easiest font to read on a screen when used for anything other than headings.

I do like the serif companion of the Apple’s San Francisco font family called “New York” — it has the advantage of not being used as much as its sans-serif cousin, which is used all over Apple software and websites, and it looks smart and elegant.

I also really like the look of Hiragino Sans: I’d love to make it the main font of this site if it weren’t for its weird line-spacing.

It surely doesn’t help that I’m a sucker for system fonts, which limits my curiosity and my ability to try some fancy fonts that I might otherwise love. If I like to discover new fonts, for example via the excellent Dense Discovery newsletter, I very rarely consider installing them on my machines or using them on a website.

The only third-party font I have installed on my Mac is the excellent Input: a great monospace font that can be customised to your liking. You can configure how the zeros look (with or without a bar, or a dot), the line-height, how the lowercase As and Gs look, the shape of curly brackets, etc. This font is what allowed me to only use TextEdit as my only writing app for so many months; otherwise the lack of a line-height setting alone would have made it unusable for writing.

These days, I also like to use SF Mono in my writing apps, replacing Menlo, which I have been using for as long as I can remember.

I guess I don’t love a particular font, but I love to use monospaced fonts.

Yesterday, I listened to the latest episode of the Back To Work podcast, and this is how Merlin Mann explains his preference for monospaced fonts when it comes to writing:

I’m not a developer. It’s just sensible for me. If you look at it from an infinite timeline or historical perspective, to the normal human eye I am closer to a computer programmer than I am to René Descartes. I type on my home computer and it looks like I’m programming, but I’m typing in the same way that anybody else would have written with a fancy quill. It’s just that because of my workflow, it makes sense for me to adopt a lot of the best practices of people who do computer tricks for a living.

I never realised until today that I never write a proper draft with a serif or sans-serif font: I only use fixed-width fonts. Sure, at work I might use a sans-serif when I need to quickly prepare something on Google Docs, but for my blog, for serious projects, for notes, and basically for any app I use to write anything, I opt for a monospaced font. Even my minimal email client setup defaults to plain text and therefore a monospaced font.

I guess habits can explain the most part of my preference for these typefaces. I can’t think of a good practical reason for using Menlo instead of a nice sans-serif font to write anything: there must be good reasons, otherwise it wouldn’t be such a popular behaviour, would it?

Perhaps — like what Merlin Mann suggests in the podcast — the fact that we associate monospaced fonts with code makes the writing feel more precise, more “technical”?

Or is it because, thanks to Hollywood, we associate writing with the sound of an old typewriter and monospaced fonts look like they were typed on one? I’m not sure, maybe I’m missing something.¹

What I am sure of, is that if I work and type a draft in a sans serif or a serif font, it wont’ feel as good, it won’t feel as refined. I would not enjoy the experience. I would probably never finish that draft.

A draft set in a monospaced font feels like it can be further edited and chewed on furthermore, like a raw material, like code. It feels like a work in progress.

That doesn’t mean a text file written in a fixed-width font necessarily looks unfinished; I find that there is a certain charm or je ne sais quoi to a beautifully typed document in a monospaced font.²

To me, monospaced fonts are the digital equivalent of handwriting with a pencil. You would not write a cover letter with a pencil, you’d choose a nice fountain pain, or you’d type it and print it (with a serif font) to make it look more official, more final. You won’t write a Happy New Year card with a pencil either, but you will definitely use a pencil to draw the shape of something before you start painting over it.

This is what monospaced fonts feel like to me: a digital pencil I use to start writing, to shape and refine my ideas. Once I’m happy with the result, I will eventually share the text using a regular font, on this website for instance, as if it were real ink.

So the next time someone asks me: “What’s your favourite font?” I think I’ll answer something like “If I have to use it to write something down, then I guess I love Input, SF Mono, or Menlo. If I don’t have to use the font to write, then I don’t really have a favourite.”