Template:Mxt/User CSS for a monospaced coding font

You can consistently use a monospaced font with well-designed characters for coding (e.g., to distinguish clearly between l, 1, and I, and between O and 0, and between -, −, –, and —).

Add something like one of the code snippets below into your Special:MyPage/common.css page, replacing "Roboto Mono" with whatever your preferred coding font is (Roboto Mono was picked as a freely-available coding font for this example).

This code will do the following:

  • Apply a consistent monospace font of your choice (and the fallback system-default monospace, should that font go missing or not have characters you need) to all the normally monospaced HTML elements like <code>, <pre>, etc.
  • Do the same for the classes used by {{mxt}} and other monospaced templates in the {{xt}} family
  • Do the same for additional site-wide classes (as identified so far, e.g. .monospaced) that output as monospace.
  • Make the three most frequently encountered editing fields also use this font stack: the main editing window, the edit summary line, and the search entry box.

Horizontal style 

/* Use my font, when available, for code */
code, pre, samp, kbd, tt, .example-mono, .userlinks-username, .monospaced, .keyboard-key, .button, .plaincode { font-family: "Roboto Mono", monospace !important; }
/*  Make some of the editable stuff monospaced */
#wpTextbox1, #wpSummary, #searchInput, #searchText { font-family: "Roboto Mono", monospace !important; }

Vertical style 

/* Use my font, when available, for code */
code,
pre,
samp,
kbd,
tt,
.example-mono,
.userlinks-username,
.monospaced,
.keyboard-key,
.button
.plaincode {
  font-family: "Roboto Mono", monospace !important;
}
/*  Make some of the editable stuff monospaced */
#wpTextbox1,
#wpSummary,
#searchInput,
#searchText {
  font-family: "Roboto Mono", monospace !important;
}

Cleanup efforts

If you'd like to help clean up instances of the <tt>...</tt> element – which has not been valid HTML since the 1990s, and should usually be replaced with <code>...</code> (this may vary by context) – you can add something like the following to your common.css to make <tt> stick out like a sore thumb: 

/* Flag bad code for cleanup */
tt { color: DarkRed; background: Pink; }

You can also do this with <font>, <center>, <strike>, and other deprecated elements. For CSS you can just import for this, see meta:User:SMcCandlish/lint.css.

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