Best Unicode Fonts for Coders

Criterions for Best Font

The font should be:

• Monospace.
• Clearly distinguish {digit zero, uppercase letter O, lowercase letter o } 0 O o and {digit one, lowercase letter L, capital case letter I} 1 l I
• Have lots math symbols and commonly used Unicode character available.

There are lots fonts designed for programers, but as soon as you have some math symbols, they don't work well.

Unicode Character Sample

Copy and Paste the following into your editor, see how your font do. Look for missing font, and consistency

• unicode.txt
• coding_font_test.txt

For more examples of Unicode characters, see:

• Unicode: Math Symbols π² ∞ ∫
• Unicode: Keyboard Symbols ⌘ ↵ ⌫

Best Monospace Fonts for Unicode

Best monospace fonts for unicode are:

• Microsoft Windows: Consolas (builtin)
• Microsoft Windows: Cascadia Mono (builtin) 〔see Cascadia vs Consolas〕
• MacOS: Menlo (builtin)

• DejaVu Sans Mono https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/
• Iosevka https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
• JuliaMono https://juliamono.netlify.app

Font for Emoji 😸 👍

• Download Free Unicode Fonts

Which Font Has All Unicode Chars?

No single font has ALL Unicode chars. At best, they contain all chars in the Basic Multilingual Plane, meaning, the most commonly used ~65 thousand chars. (That is, 16 bits).

Font Substitution Tech

{Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux} all have Font substitution technology. When a char in the current font doesn't have a glyph, the system search for the glyph in other available fonts. So, this way, each font can be specially designed for a particular language or purpose, while you can still display many Unicode symbols in the same page.

As of 2021, today's font contain lots unicode, and also font substitution tech is robust. You can use Microsoft Windows Consolas or MacOS Menlo to display text with lots math symbols and it usually looks fine. But if you really use a lot math symbols, and want all characters to be aligned, JuliaMono, DejaVu Sans, Iosevka are the solution.