Graphical limitations are the reason monospace fonts first featured in computing, but they’re still used in text editors today because of their readability. There’s nothing you’ll spend more time looking at, and you should consider this as important as choosing the right peripherals for your work setup. If you spend a lot of time in your code editor, you should take some time to choose the best monospace font for developers according to your preferences.
They’re distinguished from other fonts by having fixed-width characters which all occupy the same amount of horizontal space. The distinctive text you expect in an editor like Visual Studio Code is set in a monospace font, and they’ve become synonymous with code itself. Whether or not you know the name, you know what a monospace font is.