The recent release of Coda has been splashed all over the Internet over the past few days. As usual, the Panic team has done an outstanding job and delivered an application that is both visually innovative and quintessentially Mac-like. Coda, unfortunately, does not fit into my already Panic-powered workflow, except for one little gem, that I already cannot live without.

That gem lives within the Coda bundle and is called “Panic Sans.dfont”. It is, in other words, a font, dubbed “Panic Sans”, that Coda uses for its editor. As it is located within the bundle of the application, it is just available automatically with no need to install it separately. Sleek!

I write pretty much all day long. In fact, it is 2:34 AM at the very moment I am writing this and I am winding down from a day of writing XHTML and CSS by writing a few letters to the editor and this very blog post. As a true Mac user (kidding, people, to each his taste), I do all my writing in BBEdit, using the very old-fashioned Pro Font - and I upload my files with Transmit, while looking at my Stattoo clocks.

At least, I used to use Pro Font. In barely 24 hours, I have become addicted to Panic Sans. Maybe it is a repackaged font I could have gotten for $5 on the Internet, maybe it is a carefully crafted labor of love from Panic themselves (it probably is neither, by the way) but this font is, hands down, the best and most legible I have ever used.

It certainly would make no sense to ask Panic for that font alone - try going into a restaurant and asking for the “side salad next to your glass of water”, much like they did in a famous TV show - but it sure would be nice. Come to think of it, I would ask for a cross between the Coda editor and BBEdit. Bare Bones’ obscene reliability with Panic’s visual and organizational flair. Delirious, me?