Once upon a time, CheddarTrek linked me to this infographic about the benefits of serif and sans-serif fonts.

If you're working with large texts that you're reading over a lot, this might influence your choice.

 

That's actually quite helpful. I think I'm closer to understanding why people care about it so much.

 

Careful now . . .

 

The reason I like them is because when two sentences are exactly the same length, it's because they're exactly the same length. For instance:

wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

These two look of roughly similar length in my browser, but there's actually nearly 10 characters difference. When using a monospace font, I can tell if a sentence is too long, or a paragraph is underdeveloped, entirely at a glance.

In addition, you end up with perfectly justified text columns without actually having to justify and and end up with the kerning issues that would generally cause with a normal font. This is entirely an aesthetic consideration, but one that makes me infinitely happier when writing.

Also, it means that you can lay out things like tables purely in text without any worry that things are going to shift about the place.

 

I prefer using Fantasque Sans Mono. Nothing beats it, imo - it manages to scratch an itch I never knew I had. I use it for anything I need to write in. My terminal, IRC client, writing app. If I can configure it to use this font, I do. CheddarTrek, you might like it with your love of mono fonts. You can download it for free, it's open source.

 

For academic purposes I use Times New Roman 12pt simply because nearly every paper calls for it. However for my own personal writings I exclusively use Constantia 11pt. I don't know why - I just enjoy the look of it.

 

I write in Notepad++.
So, uh, Courier New, 10pt, I suppose.
All the time. Without exception. I just add little symbols to indicate italics and whatnot.

I'm a creature of habits, and if they aren't bad, they're at least bizarre.

 

I use the free version. It's basically like Winrar in that it occasionally asks if you'd be so kind as to donate, but that happens once a day at best and it never actually forces you to do so.

 

You could set up emacs for it as well.

 

I do all my writing in Google Docs, and don't change the font off Arial 11pt. This is probably a hold-over from when I adopted GDocs to give me the flexibility to write anywhere. I used to do a fair amount of writing on my tablet if I was away from home, and GDocs had the best workflow at the time. I think OneDrive and Word might be better now, but I can't be arsed migrating everything across.

To be honest, the typeface matters little to me, as long as it doesn't make my eyes bleed or anything. Google Docs also has a fairly nice flow for getting access to the various accented or circumflex'd characters I find myself needing frequently when writing my Lord of the Rings crossovers.