Some of us know that software not only has to work, it also should be beautiful.
One important aspect here is the font. How does this look:
1Il|iO0oB8
If you can’t tell for sure which character is which, you probably don’t use a good font.
Paul D. Hunt, a font designer working for Adobe, finally spent some time to make life for his fellow developer easier:
As a font developer, I spend a good chunk of each day coding in a text editor and reading output messages from a terminal window, so I can appreciate the importance of a good monospaced font. (source)
If you’re interested in font design, his blog post contains some of the ideas and decisions he made when designing the font. Btw, the text above looks like this in Source Code Pro:
You can download the font on Sourceforge or look at the source at GitHub.