Programmers and Their Monospace Blogs

24 Jun 2025

Many developers seem to have a fanatic obsession with monospace fonts and using them to make their blogs look “cool”. I won’t call out anyone’s blog specifically, but you don’t have to look to hard to find some. As an example theme using a monospace font by default, look at hugo-theme-terminal, which has over 2,400 stars on GitHub. If you have a blog or are thinking about starting one, and you are writing mostly prose (you probably are), I have one suggestion for you about fonts:

Do not use monospace fonts for prose.

Please use a nice proportionally-spaced font instead. It will be nicer for your readers.

Care about your readers #

I assume you care about your readers. Maybe there’s a slim fraction of a percent of developer/writers out there who are writing just so that they have a big portfolio of “content” with some metrics they can use to show off or brag about on LinkedIn. Whatever—those blokes probably don’t read much anyway, so I think I’m safe to ignore them.

If you care about your readers, you should make the reading experience pleasant for them. If I open a website that makes it hard or is uncomfortable for me to read/scan/whatever, my patience for reading whatever is on that site drops and I close the page.

What things make a website uncomfortable to read? Here are a few:

• Poor contrast
• Bad margins/too-long lines
• Crappy fonts

Setting light-gray text on a slightly-less-gray background is a great way to make people squint at your site in frustration. Not centering your text and/or having lines that are way too long also infuriates me. I want to read your article centered in my field if vision where I don’t have to turn my head. I’ve got a big monitor. Just slap margin: auto and max-width: 45rem on the body element in your CSS and you’re good to go. It’s not hard.

Monospace fonts are a bad choice for prose because—news flash—we’re not used to reading monospace fonts! Every book on my shelf—from deeply technical texts like Types and Programming Languages by Pierce to high fantasy like The Way of Kings by Sanderson—is set in a proportional font.

Monospace fonts are a holdover from the typewriter age. Thankfully, our technology is well past the limitations of that machine, and good typography can rule again. If you still don’t believe me that monospace fonts are bad for prose, maybe professional typographer-cum-programmer Matthew Butterick can change your mind.

Monospace is good for code (duh) #

If you look around on my blog, you will find plenty of code set in a monospace font. Code should be set in a monospace font. I actually use a monospace font when I write! (Partly because I’m used to it, and partly because I haven’t bothered to set up my editor to switch to something else when I’m writing.) So please don’t take this post as a tirade against monospace fonts in all contexts.

Just use your browser’s reader mode! #

Yeah, I do use my browser’s reader mode frequently when I want to read some long-form text. It’s a nice way to get a decent-looking view of the text on a page. In some cases, it hides distracting elements, making it infinitely superior to an ad-riddled page.

But if reader mode is your suggestion to get around your bad monospaced font, isn’t that an admission of failure? I would think that you would want your blog to be nice enough to look at that people don’t even think about using reader mode because your website is pleasing to read as-is. If you want to include source code and images into your post, reader mode sometimes mangles those.

I won’t advise you exactly what style you should set your blog/website in. That’s up to you and is in large part a matter of taste. But this part is not subjective: prose is meant to be set in a proportional font.

Please stop using monospace for prose.