[HN Gopher] JetBrains Mono - the free and open-source typeface f...
___________________________________________________________________
JetBrains Mono - the free and open-source typeface for developers
Author : onnnon
Score : 264 points
Date : 2022-01-20 14:26 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| thecosmicfrog wrote:
| Source Code Pro is my personal go-to.
| dang wrote:
| Past related threads:
|
| _JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22053998 - Jan 2020 (201
| comments)
|
| _JetBrains Mono: A free and open source typeface for developers_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062675 - Jan 2020 (29
| comments)
| s5806533 wrote:
| JetBrains Mono won the coding font tournament [1] for me, but
| said tournament did't have "Hack", which still looks best in my
| IDE (geany).
|
| [1] https://www.codingfont.com/
| Trex_Egg wrote:
| I just converted to this font and using it for a month almost.
| Seems good on my editor/
| traspler wrote:
| I really, really like Anonymous Pro. In comparison JB Mono looks
| similar enough but a bit fatter, not a bad look :)
| fc373745 wrote:
| I've tried IBM plex, Fira, and even bought Operator Mono.
|
| Always switched back to Ubuntu Mono.
|
| It may not be the coolest looking font, but the most legible to
| me.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Almost all programming fonts suck on Windows. They're designed
| for retina DPI MacBooks with Apple rendering. It's annoying.
|
| As a Windows programmer my #1 font for ~15 years was Consolas. I
| recently made the change to Cascadia Mono. It took a couple of
| days to get used but it's better.
|
| #1 Cascadia Mono #2 Consolas #3 Death
| usrme wrote:
| I think I switched to this font a couple of years ago and I've
| been unable to find anything that even comes close! At this point
| I would consider JetBrains Mono to be my forever font.
| khaledh wrote:
| Same here.
| GordonS wrote:
| I do like JetBrains Mono, but I personally prefer Fira Code.
| Plain old Consolas (a standard Windows font) actually comes
| pretty close too.
| typon wrote:
| Agreed. Fira Code is still the most aesthetically pleasing
| font that has all the modern features. Can't stand how
| robotic JetBrains Mono looks.
| klysm wrote:
| Consolas is still one of the best
| mbar84 wrote:
| I would argue, that a more narrow font gives you more bang for
| the buck in terms of information per area of foveal vision.
| Even if something looks aesthetically more pleasing, if it
| serves is purpose better, you'll get used to everything else.
|
| My history is: Monoid -> Iosevka SS05 -> Essential PragmataPro
|
| I just compared the latter two to JetBrains Mono, and at least
| on my settings, doing a blink comparison, they both look more
| clear to me.
| petepete wrote:
| I've been using it for about a year, definitely won't be
| changing any time soon.
| krat0sprakhar wrote:
| Exactly in the same boat. Whenever I setup a new workstation, I
| install this font right away and set it as default in my IDE,
| terminal etc.
| fortyseven wrote:
| It unseated Ubuntu Mono as my "forever". I was stunned that
| happened!
|
| I ended up going with a slashed zero variant of JetBrains Mono.
| Now it's perfect.
| ragnese wrote:
| I keep trying to switch away from Ubuntu Mono, but I always
| end up switching back after a few days. I just played "the
| font game" and Source Code Pro won for me, today (But my top
| contenders were pretty much what I expected: Fira, Ubuntu,
| Source Code Pro). So, maybe I'll give SCP another few days
| and see what happens.
| rob74 wrote:
| My favorite is still Go Mono (and not only for Go) - mostly
| because I prefer the good old "typewriter-style" fonts with
| serifs. "Sans-serif" monospace fonts look odd to me because most
| letters are sans-serif, but then they have to add serifs to I, i,
| l, 1 etc. to avoid having them look "skinny".
| Axsuul wrote:
| I try every programming font but always end up going back to
| Monaco.
| amir734jj wrote:
| Monaco is my go-to font
| i_like_apis wrote:
| There was a great Show HN a few months ago of a game to find your
| favorite programming font and JetBrains Mono is one of the
| contenders:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29010443
| hahnchen wrote:
| Apple's fonts are quite nice. I use sf mono.
|
| You can download it from https://developer.apple.com/fonts
| epicide wrote:
| Looks like SF Mono is what replaced Menlo.
|
| Interestingly enough, JetBrains Mono seems _very_ similar to
| Menlo. Biggest difference I see is the 0.
| vr46 wrote:
| Love this font, has half-replaced Pragmata after a decade or so.
| Super-good in the terminal.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| For me, not enough difference between 0 and O, zero and capital
| o
| smasher164 wrote:
| This is up there with Inconsolata as one of the best monospace
| fonts, IMO.
| raphlinus wrote:
| Why thank you :)
|
| People may not know that Inconsolata is now a 2-axis variable
| font with a particularly wide width range: 0.5 to 2.0 of the
| nominal width.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| > Ligatures in programming fonts are a terrible idea.
|
| > And not because I'm a purist or a grump. (Some days, but not
| today.) Programming code has special semantic considerations.
| Ligatures in programming fonts are likely to either misrepresent
| the meaning of the code, or cause miscues among readers. So in
| the end, even if they're cute, the risk of error isn't worth it.
|
| - Matthew Butterick, _Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No_ ,
| https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures-in-programming-fon...
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > cause miscues among readers
|
| Surely the readers are reading the code in the font of _their_
| choosing. If they get miscued by ligatures, that 's squarely on
| them, because _they 're_ the ones that chose to read it in a
| ligature font. That's the beauty of fonts - they can be very
| personal.
| viktorcode wrote:
| I agree. The symbol combinations may have different meaning
| depending on where they appear. Replacing raw symbols with
| ligatures will create confusion.
|
| I was using this font in Rider when JetBrains made it the
| default, but gave up after several months. The ligatures were
| giving me a pause still. The effect was opposite to ease of
| reading the code.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| I think ligatures are amazing, makes code easier to read for
| me.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| For me it depends on what's being written. For the stuff I work
| with day to day (all very "boring"/mainstream languages)
| there's no possibility of ligatures causing confusion, and I
| find them to be an enhancement in both aesthetics and
| readability.
|
| I also think it would be interesting if a programming language
| used the Unicode characters that ligatures simulate rather than
| combinations of general purpose characters, but that seems
| unlikely given that it'd require a new programmer-oriented
| keyboard layout.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| You should check out APL.
|
| Dyalog still has special APL keyboards.
| peeters wrote:
| I tend to agree not because I think they often get the
| semantics wrong, but because it's an unnecessary translation
| operation my brain has to do. Why does my brain need to process
| two different ways of representing the same thing (one when
| typing, one when reading)?
| moron4hire wrote:
| And yet, somehow, no such thing has actually happened.
| CapsAdmin wrote:
| I've witnessed curly quotes finding its way into html due to
| copy paste causing at least an hour of debugging.
|
| So I can imagine when there are tools to prettify code for
| blogs this can become an issue for some languages.
|
| While not entirely related to ligatures, my own biggest
| offender has been strange whitespace being treated as an
| identifier in LuaJIT. Mostly caused by my Norwegian keyboard
| layout producing strange whitespace when you want to write
| the not operator "~=" if you're not careful enough.
|
| You can blame many parts here, LuaJIT for allowing this in
| the first place, editors lacking tools to deal with it or
| normalize pasted code, me for not using a us layout, me copy
| pasting code, or me not being careful enough.
|
| Thankfully vscode will now highlight non standard whitespace
| with a yellow box. And best of all I've learned to be aware
| of these things when copy pasting code from the browser.
| enobrev wrote:
| It's a strange claim - to say it's a terrible idea. I've been
| programming for over 20 years and I've been using a font with
| ligatures for nearly a year now. For me, personally, it
| increases legibility and clarity. I feel slightly stunted when
| I don't have them. I read other people's code with ligatures on
| just fine as well.
|
| I also hate dark mode and small fonts, and I let my code run
| way past 120 chars per line when it's right to do so.
|
| I couldn't possibly care how other developers read code. I want
| them to be able to read my code and so I try to code for
| clarity, but I can't imagine a font choice or many other IDE
| preferences affecting their ability to read the code I write.
| dheera wrote:
| You can disable the ligatures in your editor or use Jetbrains
| Mono NL which is the no-ligature version.
|
| Bottom line is it's just there, enable or disable depending on
| your preference.
| howdydoo wrote:
| If you think "-" misrepresents the meaning of "->", then
| certainly "->" also misrepresents the meaning of a semantic
| arrow "-". The set of symbols in 7-bit ASCII is somewhat
| arbitrary after all.
|
| Let's say "-" misrepresents the meaning of "->" even as much as
| 0.1% of the time. Would you rather your risk of error be 99.9%,
| or 0.1%?
|
| I'm sick of anti-ligature people telling everyone else not to
| enjoy their fonts, on every single post about a font. Ligatures
| have caught on for a reason.
| cwaffles wrote:
| The issue is that people also share screenshots, and
| ligatures are not universally shaped or styled, unlike ASCII.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Screenshots are a suboptimal way to share code in general,
| and should be avoided. If you are trying to copy code from
| a screenshot something has gone horribly wrong in your
| process. If you are having trouble reading ligatures, that
| may be a learning curve issue you can adapt to with more
| use. (Arguably, most ligatures should be obvious with
| enough familiarity with the programming language without
| needing to look them up or learn them.)
|
| Most other ways of code sharing you just copy and paste
| into a non-ligature font if you need to.
|
| Aside: "ASCII" symbols are neither universally shaped or
| styled _either_. The easiest and obvious example to mind is
| the plain 0, dotted 0, slashed 0 choice and confusion with
| nearby symbols such as O and o and th (Theta, not far away
| in "Extended ASCII"). Similarly all the variations of
| lower-case L (versus 1 and i). Those choices vary
| considerably between fonts and are another huge reason some
| people prefer certain monospace fonts over others and the
| debate over "best" will likely be an ever ongoing one. You
| may not think these issues compare to ligature use, but
| it's exactly the same sort of style debates.
| calcifer wrote:
| > I'm sick of anti-ligature people telling everyone else not
| to enjoy their fonts
|
| Who is doing that? Certainly not the author. It sounds to me
| like you're taking the author's opinions as a personal
| affront, which seems... weird.
| eproxus wrote:
| If you say it is a "terrible idea" that kind of implies
| that anyone who has the idea to add them to their font or
| use a font that supports it has made a terrible choice. At
| least, that's how I interpret it.
|
| It's certainly not the most neutral phrasing.
| grayclhn wrote:
| Works great until some jerk uses `-` as a variable name...
| laurent92 wrote:
| The only thing that is annoying with -> as two characters is
| the misalignment of the horizontal center. If the ligature
| had always centered the - to the middle of the >, I'm not
| sure so many people would be pushing towards having a single
| arrow.
| fermentation wrote:
| I thought it was weird at first, but I grew to really enjoy the
| way they look. It isn't too difficult to figure out, because
| even if you don't use ligatures when you look at one you know
| right away it is an unusual symbol and you need to look at it a
| little closer to figure out what it is.
|
| Also, if something doesn't turn red when you swap an = for a ==
| then it's time to re-evaluate code coverage.
|
| Edit: I should note that I mainly write C and C++. Other
| languages may make ligatures less pleasant
| politelemon wrote:
| I find ligatures increase the difficulty of
| communicating/collaborating with other developers. When working
| through a problem together in a screenshare, or at their
| machine, having to visually parse what they're displaying
| creates a speedbump in my head as I have to pause and
| translate. Some ligatures are not too bad, easily discernible,
| but some are particularly egregious.
|
| The worst offenders tend to be anything involving '!' and '='
| and the many varying stylistic interpretations of it. It
| appears that font designers are in a race to outdo each other,
| or introduce it for the 'coolness' factor and eschewing the
| practicalities involved.
|
| But I don't want to be a grump and I do keep trying out
| ligature fonts every now and again, always with negative
| results.
| usrusr wrote:
| "Is this a ligature or is it a homoglyph attack" is certainly
| a waste of cycles that nobody should have to endure. (why am
| I thinking of Scala all of a sudden, Scala has done nothing
| wrong!)
|
| Perhaps if some radical homoglyph defenses get established
| they could also take this sting out of ligatures? (how about
| highlighting everything that cannot be typed with your
| current keyboard layout, or with the layouts in whatever
| quick access scheme you might have?)
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Hmm. Yeah, I really don't think I like != ligature. I don't
| want to mistake it for some non-ascii unicode symbol, and I
| generally like what I type to stay the way I typed it
| (including curly quotes!).
|
| Yeah, no thank you.
|
| Also, I notice that Jetbrains Mono doesn't ligature ~= as !=,
| but that is what it means in Matlab. So it really seems like
| assumptions about language semantics is baked in to the font.
|
| Jetbrains Mono does offer the no-ligature version.
| gnull wrote:
| The ligature [?] for != is very C/C++/Java-specific, which is
| kind of annoying. Is there a way to selectively disable
| ligatures like this one?
| timw4mail wrote:
| It's a very common logic operator across a multitude of
| languages. In what situation do you have that sequence of
| characters that isn't a logic operator?
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| ~= and <> are common-enough, e.g. in Matlab, SQL
|
| Having a ligature for != but not for the others betrays its
| language-independent semantics.
|
| != in Matlab is not legal logic operator.
|
| Also, != might be part of regular expression.
| usrusr wrote:
| I might be imagining this but I think that I have seen
| ligatures on/off being used as a deliberate hint to convey the
| difference between read-only and editable code. That's a very
| nice tweak. InteliJ at least can be configured that way, might
| be a case where its Android Studio incarnation has different
| defaults.
| CapsAdmin wrote:
| I always felt it's slightly sad that we're stuck with only
| being able to type the ASCII symbols
| !"#$%&'()*+,.-./\:;<=>?@~|{} efficiently.
|
| So languages that want to express more with different symbols
| find it difficult to do so with our limited set. You end up
| with combinations of symbols that look familiar to existing
| combination of symbols, and for those who find this problematic
| to read we have ligatures.
| dorian-graph wrote:
| This gives me the same vibe as "Why get rid of the DVD drive?".
|
| I've used ligatures now for several years (with JetBrains Mono
| in particular for some time). I've done lots of pair
| programming and a common immediate reaction is "How can I get
| those too?! It makes it so nice to read and understand".
|
| Instead of throwing them out because of some edge cases, why
| not improve the software for the edge cases?
| kortex wrote:
| I make less errors and find errors more readily with ligatures
| on. The instant I saw them on my coworker's machine, I had
| installed Fira and enabled ligatures in Jetbrains. I have ADHD
| and I'm a highly visual person. I love ligatures, emojis, and
| any CLI tool that "makes my terminal look like a disco" (to
| quote a different coworker).
|
| I'm sure it's a highly personal thing, but Matthew Butterick
| proclaims it's more universally bad than it actually is.
|
| That is why there's a checkbox for enabling ligatures.
|
| Like why is this a thing? It's like proclaiming certain font
| sizes aren't worth it. My dev machine is my interface. I should
| be able to do what I like with it.
|
| Edit: I guess he addresses this in a footnote, but hardly:
|
| > "What do you mean, it's not a matter of taste? I like using
| ligatures when I code." Great! In so many ways, I don't care
| what you do in private. Although I predict you will eventually
| burn yourself on this hot mess, my main concern is typography
| that faces other human beings.
|
| A) I've never burned myself b) other than screen shares (again,
| nary a complaint, but several "cool! How do I get that?") I'm
| never rendering code for others to consume. I agree that a
| ligatured font would be bad e.g. for publishing code in a
| whitepaper.
| [deleted]
| bokchoi wrote:
| > There are a lot of ways for a given sequence of characters,
| like !=, to end up in a source file. Depending on context, it
| doesn't always mean the same thing.
|
| While this is true, it doesn't seem to come up that often in
| practice. I'd say this appears when I'm viewing log files or
| something that isn't a programming language.
| one_off_comment wrote:
| This font ships with a ligature-less version.
| donatj wrote:
| > They grow on you.
|
| - Me
|
| I honestly really didn't like them at first, but I came to love
| Fira Code after a couple false starts.
|
| My IDE catches the errors this guy mentions.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Yet another facet of the infantization of this trade
| moron4hire wrote:
| Ah, yes, my preference for how a couple of bytes of data in
| my text file end up getting mapped to a few dozen more bytes
| of data on my screen. _That_. That was the moment things went
| to far.
| [deleted]
| oxff wrote:
| They're fine in moderation, like for logical signs. I wouldn't
| want UNICODE symbol soup like Agda code seems to be.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| Yes, there are some problems, like a double arrow to the left
| `<=` which is not the same as a 'less than or equal' or, to a
| lesser extend, 'less than -1', which can be written as `a<-1`,
| which is no arrow `a <- 1`.
|
| But I still use them ;).
| onychomys wrote:
| Since R uses back arrows to assign values to variables, you
| could potentially have to write x <- -1, which could get
| messy.
| boomskats wrote:
| Matthias Tellen also has an interesting take on this subject in
| in issue #29 for his font mononoki [0]. I love mononoki.
|
| [0]:
| https://github.com/madmalik/mononoki/issues/29#issuecomment-...
| schleck8 wrote:
| Looks fantastic, I'll definitely try this one out
| barrenko wrote:
| Mononoki, Input Mono are in my Top 3.
| sfteus wrote:
| Functional considerations aside, there's definitely some
| personal issues with ligatures. Spacing in code is incredibly
| important for a lot of people. I'm dyslexic, so distinguishing
| between something like someValue=someOtherValue() and
| someValue->someOtherValue() adds additional unnecessary
| complexity compared to simply writing assignments with spacing
| (ie, someValue = someOtherValue()). This makes it significantly
| easier for me to interpret it at a glance.
|
| That leads into my personal issue with ligatures: they change
| what should be a binary operation into a more complex one.
| Instead of "I see equals signs, one space or two?" it becomes
| "I need to stop, change to a vertical reading direction, and
| see if that's 2 or 3 lines" or "I need to estimate if that is 2
| or 3 characters worth of width, or get off track comparing it
| to characters on the line above." Comparison operators should
| simply be "greater space equals" but become "wait, was there a
| second line there? I have to go back and double check that."
|
| I'm sure someone will come along and say "how is reading the
| number of spaces different than reading the number of lines?"
| It might be that the spacing is normalized without ligatures,
| it might just be the vertical spacing in ligatures is too
| small, I don't really know. It's incredibly difficult to convey
| this to someone who doesn't experience it, all I can say is it
| is a night and day difference to me.
|
| I've given Fira Code a shot 2 or 3 times but have found the
| ligatures to hinder my productivity every time. I also tried
| them just in the "reader mode" with Jetbrains Mono when that
| feature was first released, but had to turn it off after a few
| days.
|
| That all being said, I won't fault anyone for using them if it
| helps them in the same way that not using them helps me. I'm
| just glad they can be disabled in Jetbrains Mono as it is
| otherwise an incredible font.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| Interesting. A friend of mine is dyslexic and has expressed a
| strong preference for ligatured fonts for programming for the
| opposite reason. I guess the lesson is to leave people alone
| with their preferences...
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| I'm the most whiny opinionated person on the planet and even I
| find this stupid. Why would you care about what code looks like
| on _other_ people 's screens? If it works for them, it works
| for them. Christ. I hate this industry sometimes. There are
| serious problems and then there's people writing argument bait
| about ligatures.
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| Absolutely love this font, been using the Nerd fonts patched
| version for a very long time for my terminal-based workflows. One
| really minor gripe that I have with it is the triple asterisk
| ligature which I have no use for. But it's so minor that I never
| bothered to patch this symbol out.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| get the non ligatures version. ligatures are extra terrible in
| a terminal
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| I have been using kitty on Linux for quite a while now, and
| it handles ligatures extremely well. I like seeing nice
| arrows in my terminal.
| fleaaa wrote:
| Am I the only one rocking with agave? Especially agave NF, it
| looks a bit funky (casual-looking) but it's been really easy on
| my eyes on not-too-high res display(34' 1440p).
|
| https://github.com/blobject/agave
| one_off_comment wrote:
| I used to use Fira Code. Then I played this font game and I
| switched to JetBrains Mono.
|
| https://www.codingfont.com/
| jedimastert wrote:
| I really like the idea, although I'd really prefer if I could
| pick an example for a language I actually use. Even just my own
| snippet
| mcdonje wrote:
| I use fira code. I just played this with the names hidden and
| still ended up with fira code, lol. Both are extremely good,
| though.
| knuthsat wrote:
| I do not know why but this game makes the winning font look
| much better than it is when I use my code.
|
| Whenever I try the winning font (b612, fira mono), I always go
| back to Liberation Mono.
| mbar84 wrote:
| I think it has to do with rendering. Have a spin with
| iosevka-term-ss05.
| afturner wrote:
| Long time Fira Code user, also ended up with JetBrains Mono.
| Runner up was IBM Plex Mono.
| dxdm wrote:
| I don't see a runner up, only the winner. Did they change the
| game? Playing on mobile, Android Firefox.
| afturner wrote:
| I hid the font names until I reached the final two. Decided
| which I liked better and then disabled the toggle to see
| the names.
| xbar wrote:
| Same.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I use Fira too, currently, but IBM just won for me, with
| JetBrains as the runner up. I'm actually surprised by that,
| and learned a lot from this game(?).
| aiilns wrote:
| I don't much like that differences in sizing are not taken into
| consideration (not all fonts are equally large at a given pixel
| size).
|
| I have been using Fira Code extensively and also writing texts.
| Both in English & in Greek, both spotting my mistakes and
| reading what I'd written improved within minutes of first
| trying it out. I may give JetBrains Mono a try as well, though
| I really am taken with Fira Code.
|
| Unfortunately I have yet to find the perfect general purpose
| font to use in general. Ubuntu fonts do come really close to
| being perfect.
| drBonkers wrote:
| I ended up with Xanh Mono-- I wonder if that says anything
| about my reading style.
| benbristow wrote:
| I've been using JetBrains Mono on JetBrains Rider at home/work,
| has been pretty good.
|
| Playing that game though ended up with liking Roboto Mono the
| most, Fira being a close second.
| jcelerier wrote:
| i've been using anonymous pro for years, did it, and landed on
| anonymous pro lol. too bad it does not have a good bitmap 4k
| version..
| jedberg wrote:
| Just played the game with names off and ended up with Fira
| Code. But since I have the names off, I don't know what second
| place was, but I think it was Jetbrains Mono based on the look
| of it.
| anotherevan wrote:
| Also just played, and ended up with ennui.
| sfteus wrote:
| I feel this would be more interesting if you could hide the
| font names until you were done.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| You can, it has a toggle.
| sfteus wrote:
| I somehow missed that, thanks
| [deleted]
| invisible wrote:
| This site is pretty neat! It's a bit weird it doesn't have
| Menlo, Monaco, etc. to compare to some widespread fonts. I'm
| not sure what I'd pick if those were mixed in.
| peakaboo wrote:
| I also ended up with Jetbrains Mono but Ive been too lazy to
| switch from Fira Code which is also really good. But soon!
| electric_mayhem wrote:
| Bitstream Vera Sans Mono has been my monospaced font of choice
| for years, but having seen JetBrains Mono when I started playing
| with their IDEs last year... it's really good, and has some
| features I prefer over BVSM.
| faldore wrote:
| RBerenguel wrote:
| If we are throwing font recommendations here, I favour Monoid
| [M], I love its glyphs and look. But some years ago I installed
| Victor Mono [V] as a kind of practical joke on myself (it has
| _italics_ , usually enabled for comments in the language you use
| in your editor, but of course that's up to where you want them)
| and I found it's actually extremely nice because of that. I now
| also use it on Obsidian (the other monospaced editor I use aside
| from VS Code/emacs) [M]:
| https://larsenwork.com/monoid/ [V]:
| https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/
|
| Edit: formatting
| manmal wrote:
| Installing this font is the first thing I do when setting up a
| new editor. It has a great character and feels pretty much ideal
| to me.
| sawaali wrote:
| In terms of legibility, aesthetic balance, and not being over-
| engineered, I haven't found anything better than M+ 1:
| https://macwright.com/2014/07/09/mplus.html
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I'll be giving JetBrains Mono a try, but for the past few years
| I've been enjoying Dank Mono[0] for writing Swift, Obj-C, Kotlin,
| and C#. In particular I like its handwriting-inspired italic
| style, which works well for adding contrast to things like
| keywords.
|
| [0]: https://philpl.gumroad.com/l/dank-mono
| dorfsmay wrote:
| I've started using JetBraims Mono after a friend suggested it to
| me.
|
| If you hesitate between a few fonts, edit some text in your
| terminal and reduce the size of the font/terminal until it's
| almost unreadable. Pay special attention to the i, l, o, 0 etc...
| DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote:
| Julia Mono font is pretty great. https://juliamono.netlify.app/
| ralgozino wrote:
| In my case the font that made me stop switching fonts every month
| was Victor Mono: https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| <Laughs in Monaco>
| 19h wrote:
| Absolutely amazing font. Used it since the first day it was out
| and never looked back. Improved the code readability for me so
| much it's among the first things I setup on a new Mac. I also use
| it for the terminal, as a font override in dark reader on a bunch
| of websites, ...
| macrael wrote:
| Anyone have good examples of proportional width fonts that have
| coding focused changes, like well differentiated 0/O and I/l and
| or coding ligatures? I've been really happy just using Avenir for
| coding for the last 10 years or so, but I'd love something
| proportional that was a bit more coding aware.
|
| rant: Fixed width fonts are an abomination invented b/c they were
| easier to program for display in early terminals and computers
| have long since been fast enough to eschew them forever.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Nice to meet another fan of proportional fonts! I find them so
| much more readable than monospaced.
|
| My current favorite is Trebuchet MS, or more specifically a
| version of it that I tweaked in FontForge and call Trebuchet++.
|
| Trebuchet MS ticks a lot of the boxes for me "as is". It
| doesn't have ligatures, but does have easily distinguished 0/O,
| I/l, etc. And it renders beautifully on the high-DPI monitors I
| use with the largish font sizes I prefer. I do most of my
| coding on a 24" 4K monitor, so it's just shy of 200 DPI, and I
| run it with 200% scaling on Windows and Linux.
|
| One thing I don't like in Trebuchet MS is the tilde. It is a
| scrawny little thing that is hard to distinguish from a hyphen.
| So I used FontForge to swap in a much better tilde.
|
| Then I had some fun with underscores.
|
| I don't like snake_case_names at all, but some coding standards
| mandate them. One problem with proportional fonts is that the
| underscore is much wider than the period, so you get this
| effect:
|
| snake_case.snake_case.snake_case
|
| If you look at the spacing between words here, "case.snake" is
| more tightly grouped than "snake_case" - the opposite of how it
| should be.
|
| I fixed this by adding a bit of space on each side of the
| period, and narrowing the space occupied by the underscore.
|
| At first I tried just making the underline itself shorter, but
| it was hard to tell from a period. So instead I kept most of
| the underline width and narrowed the character box instead. The
| underline tucks under the adjacent characters a bit, but it
| looks OK.
|
| The net effect is subtle, but for my eyes it makes
| snake_case.snake_case a little easier to read and understand.
|
| I have been meaning to find out if and how I could open source
| Trebuchet++ (since it's based on a Microsoft font), but in the
| meantime drop me a note if you would like a copy to try out -
| email is in my profile.
| rami3l wrote:
| 1024core wrote:
| Every once in a while when I get bored, I head over to Google
| Fonts page and download some fonts:
| https://fonts.google.com/?category=Monospace&subset=latin
| minimaxir wrote:
| My experience with JetBrains Mono is that it's too _aesthetic_
| /overdesigned for coding (coming from Fira Code), but it makes an
| excellent monospace typeface for image design.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Following aesthetic at the cost of function is a complaint I'd
| make of Fira Code, not JetBrains Mono (disregarding ligatures,
| which both overdo): Fira Code's r glyph is lousy, its & poor
| for code where immediately followed _sans_ whitespace by
| letters (common for reference syntax in C-family languages;
| it's much too similar to a letter, especially given the high ex
| height), and its ff ligation (two columns - one) downright
| idiotic.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Fair. At the least, some of those examples have variants that
| can be manually enabled: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/b
| lob/master/extras/charac...
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Actually, I must amend what I said: I was talking about
| Fira _Mono_ rather than Fira _Code_. Fira Code fixes the r
| glyph (its default r glyph is excellent and its alternative
| perfectly respectable, still having narrowed the base
| line), and offers a better ampersand as an alternative.
| Dunno about the f ligations (ff, fi, _& c._), hopefully
| they ditched that madness (even if they're opt-in
| discretionary ligatures in Fira Mono--they just have
| absolutely no place in a monospaced font, dlig or no dlig).
| LittlePeter wrote:
| I may be weird but I prefer Times New Roman.
|
| Just joking. Ubuntu Mono for me.
| mLewisLogic wrote:
| Too wide for me (makes side-by-side code windows less useful).
| Check out Iosevka SS14.
| gombosg wrote:
| Also you can think out of the box and realize that you may not
| need a monospaced font for development, but a font that has the
| advantages of monospaced fonts. I've been using Input Sans for
| years now. See at: https://input.djr.com/info/
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Last updated 274 days ago. What's new?
|
| https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/
|
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22053998
| onnnon wrote:
| I've been using this typeface lately, and it's fantastic. Well
| done!
|
| https://jetbrains.com/mono
| nick_ wrote:
| https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig is best, IMHO. It is
| https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Source+Code+Pro but with
| ligatures.
| Jenk wrote:
| "Hasklug NF" represent!
| leokennis wrote:
| Since this has turned to "list your favorite monospaced font"
| I'll happily mention I've never found anything better than
| Consolas.
| neilpanchal wrote:
| I've been working on a new typeface[1][2] for code - Berkeley
| Mono. I've taken some inspiration from Jet Brains Mono, SF Mono,
| Bit Stream Vera, Andale Mono, OCR-B, Univers, Eurostile and
| Monogramma from the 50's, and weird things like the German
| License Plate slashed 0. Anyone interested in beta testing?
| neil@berkeleygraphics.com.
|
| [1] https://neil.computer/notes/introducing-berkeley-mono/
|
| [2] https://neil.computer/notes/berkeley-mono-december-update/
| fgblanch wrote:
| Neil, congrats your site! It looks great, very cool design and
| content. The Berkeley font also looks very nice. I'll beta
| test.
| epilys wrote:
| Personally I love it and your aesthetics, kudos. Is it going to
| be for sale or openly licensed?
| neilpanchal wrote:
| I am thinking for sale, after one year make it open source?
| Another option is to make it free for personal use, and paid
| for commercial use. Font licensing is too complicated and I
| want to simplify it just as if I were to purchase the font
| for myself - unlimited use for anything and everything. No
| one should have to worry about using fonts for obvious use
| cases such as embedding in avionics, etching on nuclear power
| plant control panels and designing submarine bailout signs.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Great work, looking forward to trying it out when it's ready
| ghishadow wrote:
| looks great
| dorian-graph wrote:
| Looks neat so far! Do you plan on supporting ligatures?
| neilpanchal wrote:
| Unlikely. Explicitness and the binding between the code you
| see with the eyes and the keys on the keyboard shouldn't be
| violated IMHO. Ligatures add ambiguity ("what's this symbol?
| Which keys were pressed to create it?"), great for
| manuscripts and literature but not so great for code I
| personally think.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Matter of taste, but I like and recommend single-storey a in
| the regular not just the italic type face as variant. Or
| preferably even as default/only variant as I don't find
| switching double-storey to single-storey, or other drastical
| change of basic shapes for that matter convincing for a coding
| font.
| neilpanchal wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. Double-storey 'a' does make things
| busy. I'll see what I can do with optional single storey 'a'
| as a stylistic set. The problem with stylistic sets is no one
| uses them and they're not well supported in programming
| tools. I've got automated font file generation script in
| Glyphs app that generates all variants as separate fonts, so
| users can download whatever they want. I'll try to create a
| single storey 'a' as an option, definitely for italics which
| are still under development.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Very cool! I want to try this with cool-retro-term and vim. :)
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| Meh, I like Cascadia Code[1], especially after the designer fixed
| the awful "fun" italics.
|
| [1] https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| > especially after the designer fixed the awful "fun" italics.
|
| I like the old italics better.
| blahyawnblah wrote:
| I like the old Consolas font. Basically the same but not quite
| as thick.
| blondin wrote:
| another vote for cascadia code :)
|
| (someone should do a hn poll on programming fonts.)
| irrational wrote:
| Not a poll, but try this tool (be sure to hide font names
| using the switch at the top of the page).
| https://www.codingfont.com/
| [deleted]
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| > https://www.codingfont.com/
|
| That's terribly blurred on my screen.
| irrational wrote:
| Strange, it worked great for me.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| Actually only in the tournament part, the browser part is
| fine with the same font size (16) and fonts
| knuthsat wrote:
| Yep, blurred on one of my devices.
| paulvnickerson wrote:
| Beautiful! Thanks for sharing. This is my new font in VS Code.
| tehnub wrote:
| This story links to the GitHub repo, which is useful, but I
| really enjoy the main webpage they've made for this font:
| https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/
| j1elo wrote:
| After playing the CodingFont that others commented
| (https://www.codingfont.com/), I ended up with this list of
| winners:
|
| * Cousine
|
| * JetBrains Mono
|
| * Roboto Mono
|
| * Source Code Pro
|
| However, when actually testing, they all have a _something_ that
| doesn 't click as good as the Ubuntu Mono in terms of horizontal
| spacing.
|
| All these fonts are too wide, and the step from 10pt to 11pt
| causes a huge increment on horizontal space usage. Whereas Ubuntu
| Mono stays in a perfect sweet spot when set at 13pt.
|
| Anyone finding the same?
|
| EDIT: I made a quick visual comparison (mind that all of the
| fonts listed above have practically the same width):
|
| https://pasteboard.co/qZ8rvfV4aEHf.png
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Yeah, you can add features to your font all you want, but in
| the end it comes down to "does it feel good to read?"
| jrockway wrote:
| If you like narrow, you want Iosevka:
| https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
|
| It is my all-time favorite font.
| j1elo wrote:
| Curiously enough, this is the only font that I've tested
| which matches the horizontal proportions of Ubuntu Mono;
| well, to be precise, iosevka is actually a couple pixels
| wider than the former :-)
|
| All in all, a very nice font, although if I'm allowed to
| complain, it now seems to me that it takes too much
| _vertical_ space :-) (not just a nitpick, same test lines
| take considerably more pixels)
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's shilled pretty heavily on sites like this, but IBM Plex[0]
| Mono has always felt "right" to me with how well it fills out
| it's space at pretty much every DPI I've tried it at. Maybe
| give it a try?
|
| [0] https://www.ibm.com/plex/
| smlacy wrote:
| SF Mono (https://developer.apple.com/fonts/) is also an amazing
| font, but generally left out of most online comparison tools
| due to licensing issues. But, it's freely available for
| personal use, and is certainly worth a look, and has been my
| preferred fixed width font for quite some time.
|
| SF Mono works great in any system (not just Fruit) but you'll
| need to use a few tools to dig down to get the OTF's out of the
| DMG.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I'm unsure if the license has changed recently but I know
| that as of a year or two ago you basically had no license to
| use the font for anything but the system apps that it shipped
| with. Not that I particularly care much for it, but it's not
| really very usable for general use if you want to "stay
| legit".
| X-Istence wrote:
| Nope, that is still in the license.
|
| See here (left off most of the agreement as the comment was
| deemed too long. See https://gist.github.com/bertjwregeer/f
| aedb3d9dbf4b6e6d6ec0fa... for full license)
|
| APPLE INC. LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR THE APPLE SF MONO FONT For
| iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS application uses only
|
| PLEASE READ THIS SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT ("LICENSE")
| CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THE APPLE SF MONO FONT (DEFINED
| BELOW). BY USING THE APPLE FONT, YOU ARE AGREEING TO BE
| BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE. IF YOU ARE ACCESSING
| THE APPLE FONT ELECTRONICALLY, SIGNIFY YOUR AGREEMENT TO BE
| BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE BY CLICKING THE "AGREE"
| BUTTON. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE,
| DO NOT USE THE APPLE FONT AND CLICK "DISAGREE".
|
| IMPORTANT NOTE: THE APPLE SF MONO FONT IS TO BE USED SOLELY
| FOR CREATING MOCK-UPS OF USER INTERFACES TO BE USED IN
| SOFTWARE PRODUCTS RUNNING ON APPLE'S iOS, iPadOS, macOS,
| tvOS OR watchOS OPERATING SYSTEMS, AS APPLICABLE.
|
| 1. General. A. The Apple font, interfaces, content, data,
| and other materials accompanying this License, whether on
| disk, print or electronic documentation, in read only
| memory, or any other media or in any other form,
| (collectively, the "Apple Font") are licensed, not sold, to
| you by Apple Inc. ("Apple") for use only under the terms of
| this License. Apple and/or Apple's licensors retain
| ownership of the Apple Font itself and reserve all rights
| not expressly granted to you. The terms of this License
| will govern any software upgrades provided by Apple that
| replace and/or supplement the original Apple Font, unless
| such upgrade is accompanied by a separate license in which
| case the terms of that license will govern.
|
| B. Title and intellectual property rights in and to any
| content displayed by or accessed through the Apple Font
| belongs to the respective content owner. Such content may
| be protected by copyright or other intellectual property
| laws and treaties, and may be subject to terms of use of
| the third party providing such content. This License does
| not grant you any rights to use such content nor does it
| guarantee that such content will continue to be available
| to you.
|
| 2. Permitted License Uses and Restrictions. A. Limited
| License. Subject to the terms of this License, you may use
| the Apple Font solely for creating mock-ups of user
| interfaces to be used in software products running on
| Apple's iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS or watchOS operating
| systems, as applicable. The foregoing right includes the
| right to show the Apple Font in screen shots, images, mock-
| ups or other depictions, digital and/or print, of such
| software products running solely on iOS, iPadOS, macOS,
| tvOS or watchOS. Your use of the Apple Font shall also be
| subject to any specific use restrictions with respect
| thereto as set forth in the Apple Font or Apple's Human
| Interface Guidelines.
|
| You may use this Apple Font only for the purposes described
| in this License and only if you are a registered Apple
| Developer, or as otherwise expressly permitted by Apple in
| writing.
|
| B. Other Use Restrictions. The grants set forth in this
| License do not permit you to, and you agree not to,
| install, use or run the Apple Font for the purpose of
| creating mock-ups of user interfaces to be used in software
| products running on any non-Apple operating system or to
| enable others to do so. You may not embed the Apple Font in
| any software programs or other products. Except as
| expressly provided for herein, you may not use the Apple
| Font to, create, develop, display or otherwise distribute
| any documentation, artwork, website content or any other
| work product.
|
| Except as otherwise expressly permitted by the terms of
| this License or as otherwise licensed by Apple: (i) only
| one user may use the Apple Font at a time, and (ii) you may
| not make the Apple Font available over a network where it
| could be run or used by multiple computers at the same
| time. You may not rent, lease, lend, trade, transfer, sell,
| sublicense or otherwise redistribute the Apple Font in any
| unauthorized way.
| j1elo wrote:
| I tested it (very easy to extract the Matryoshka of files
| with "7z x") and it looks very nice, actually very similar in
| size (not shape) to Ubuntu Mono. Gives me a feeling of being
| a tad more "packed", and letters look more "squareish", but
| nonetheless a very good looking font...
|
| I'll evaluate it over a couple of days. Thanks!
| franga2000 wrote:
| Thanks for that link! I ended up getting Inconsolata, which I
| quite like, but it probably won't be replacing Fira Code for me
| any time soon. The ligatures are just too damn pretty!
| pjbk wrote:
| It's a bit taller than the usual PT Mono I regularly use. I find
| that "boxier" mono fonts are a bit more readable than elongated
| ones.
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