Microsoft Launches New Open-Source Font for Programmers

Microsoft is publishing a new font as part of its Windows Terminal efforts this week. The company’s Cascadia Code is a new monospaced font designed by Microsoft, and it is completely open-sourced on GitHub.

Microsoft’s Kayla Cinnamon, who’s part of the Windows Terminal team at the company, said the new font is designed to offer a “fresh experience” for code editors and command-line apps. The new font was developed hand-in-hand with Windows Terminal, and it will be automatically installed on the next update for Windows Terminal. The font also supports programming ligatures, so it will be perfect if you are a programmer.

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Microsoft also explained the reasoning behind the name of the font, stating that it’s called “Cascadia Code” because the original codename for Windows Terminal was “Cascadia”, and it later added “Code” to indicate the font is meant for programming.

You can download Cascadia Code here.

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Conversation 14 comments

  • rfog

    19 September, 2019 - 5:57 am

    <p>Each time I read a new font for developers, I test it and end with my good old Consolas. :-D</p>

  • tbtalbot

    Premium Member
    19 September, 2019 - 6:35 am

    <p>It looks very attractive, especially the zero. The appearance is reminiscent of something I'd see on an IBM Selectric.</p>

    • wright_is

      Premium Member
      19 September, 2019 - 6:39 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#468135">In reply to tbtalbot:</a></em></blockquote><p>It is better, but the 0 should have a diagonal line through it.</p><p>/old_school</p>

    • rfog

      19 September, 2019 - 8:12 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#468135">In reply to tbtalbot:</a></em></blockquote><p>Too faint to me. Installed, saw in Visual Studio… and went back to Consolas, as always.</p>

  • Daekar

    19 September, 2019 - 6:51 am

    <p>I love the zero, that's great!</p>

  • wbhite

    Premium Member
    19 September, 2019 - 9:39 am

    <p>Eh, I like it, but the bold and italicized texts look horrible.</p>

  • emeyerriecks

    19 September, 2019 - 9:56 am

    <p>I still like plain old Courier–not Courier New–like in old Visual C++ 6… But I'm weird.. hah!</p><p>I'll give this new one a try!</p>

  • dallasnorth40

    Premium Member
    19 September, 2019 - 10:58 am

    <p>I'm giving it a try in terminal and Atom. So far, so good.</p><p>Thanks for the info.</p>

  • christian.hvid

    19 September, 2019 - 11:46 am

    <p>Nice font, but beware that Cascadia is old-fashioned 7-bit ASCII. If your language requires accented or non-Latin characters – look elsewhere.</p><p><br></p><p>Also, the ligatures make it even more difficult to distinguish between = and ==. Other than that, readability is way better than without ligatures.</p>

  • rkpatrick

    19 September, 2019 - 12:13 pm

    <p>I like the sentiment, but these letters look too curvy at first glance (I'd need to run it in Visual Studio to see how it looks in practice). My ideal *should* be monospace Arial, but when I run that, it never looks as clean as I'd like.</p>

  • rickeveleigh

    Premium Member
    19 September, 2019 - 12:28 pm

    <p>Courier New 9pt #<span style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">StanLeszynski</span></p>

  • Mike Cramer

    19 September, 2019 - 3:04 pm

    <p>I'm trying it now, and I find it clean and pleasant.</p>

  • curtisspendlove

    19 September, 2019 - 8:21 pm

    <p>I like it, but the letters are a bit curvy for me.</p><p><br></p><p>I'm a bit of a font snob though, and probably one with questionable priorities. :)</p>

  • youwerewarned

    19 September, 2019 - 11:52 pm

    <p>Letters "ell", "eye", "oh", and numbers One and Zero are my pet peeves, and Cascadia addresses them quite well.</p>

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