What I like most about this font is that it has a completely different aesthetic from my favorite monospace, JetBrains mono. It has more of the humanist flavor of a Frutiger versus the DIN-like rationalism most monospace fonts adopt.
I am one of those using this font for ~1 year now, very happy with it. As a designer/developer with penchant for typography I am the perfect target customer I guess.
I thought this was gonna be yet another monospace font I wouldn't be able to tell from all the others, but fuck me as soon as the page loaded this one just spoke to me. Grabbing this for sure, well done!
On the topic of fonts: If your font of choice has it, try using the medium weight as the "normal" weight in your editor — I've found I prefer it to the regular weight with most fonts. I started doing this after noticing that the default Xcode font is SF Mono Medium.
I thought I was the only one doing this :P It definitely helps at smaller sizes, narrow fonts like MonoLisa simply become too faint to read easily otherwise
If you're willing to spend money on a font for coding, then do yourself a favor and take a look at PragmataPro as well. I bought a license (checks notes...) 8 years ago and it has served me very well.
If I was not down to pay for a font, then I'd probably use one of Iosevka's forms. Personally, however, it became clear to me that just like my monitor, the font I spend hours looking at every day is also worth some money.
I like narrow fonts. Barlow is excellent. News Gothic is fantastic. Geo Grotesque is super beautiful. But it just doesn't work for me when a coding font is narrow. Fonts like Iosevka and Pragmata are harder to read than needed and for no clear benefit. Especially when used for projects based on C and derivatives. If you ever find yourself needing to cram more symbols per line onto your screen, it's a sign that there's a coding style problem! Lines simply should be short enough to not require horizontal compression.
I keep my code below the 80 column mark, as is common. For me, the reason I like the more narrow Iosevka is because it lets me have more split buffers open on the same monitor. With Iosevka I can have 3 splits with a little over 80 columns each, other fonts only let me have two. I never noticed a decrease in readability but I've been using Iosevka for a very long time now, perhaps it's time to try out a wider font and see if it's worth it.
I like the narrower font so I can fit two side-by-side files with full 120 character width each on a regular 16:9 display. Iosevka is likely my forever font. I find it both beautiful and fit for purpose; I couldn't ask for more.
Re: "lines should be short." I prefer my code font to work even for bad code. It's not always my code that I'm looking at!
Ever tried editing two files side by side on a 13-14" screen? Good luck without a narrow font or tiny font sizes. Meanwhile I find narrow fonts just as readable, so for me it's an easy choice.
Yeah - I paid for Pragmata back in the day and totally forgot about it when Iosevka appeared. Even reminds me a little bit of 6x13 which I used for so long with my Dell 22"...
Iosevka is my all-time favorite font. MonoLisa seems to sell itself on being "wide", and Iosevka is the opposite of that. Each letter is exactly .5em, which is on the very narrow side of things as monospaced fonts go. So if this thing appeals to you, Iosevka isn't the free alternative you're looking for. But if you want the nicest monospaced font in the world, then Iosevka is ;)
I missed that. The website lets you compare it to IBM Plex and Fira Code as well. Same width, but a little bit more contrast. Compares very favorably if you want wide.
My takeaway is that monospaced fonts are basically a solved problem thanks to Iosevka. It does everything. And you can mix and match individual glyphs to your exact preferences!
Not a fan of these sharp modern faces in general. However, the small text in this one looks particularly "smudgy".
I stopped hopping monospace fonts when I discovered Go Mono. Go Mono does not seem to get blurry even at small sizes. M, m, n always look impeccable. Not so here.
I'm not sure. Maybe something is wrong with the text-rendering in my browser.
A serif monospace font that doesn't look it came from a typewriter? Very little separation between letters? A font made for specifically for typesetting one programming language? It really doesn't seem like it should work, but it does for me. I have it installed as the system monospace font on every computer I can.
Seems like the same amount of characters that are each wider would be wider? So you would see less characters on a line with the same amount of characters
Well yes and no. The line would visually become longer, but if we're talking enforced line length by IDE's, say 80 characters, then the line would still be 80 characters long, but just take up visually more horizontal space and so whether or not you see the same amount of characters on a line would become an issue of how much horizontal screen space do you afford for code.
"But then I can't see as many windows!" That brings us back to the GP's I need to see what I'm looking at, not what I'm not looking at". When you want to look at those other windows, bring them to the foreground and let them obscure this one.
Wider fonts are significantly easier to read than narrow fonts which is the main point a programmer typically optimizes for. Since most editors can reflow anyways and programmers are relatively conservatives for max width anyways my general experience is that I have more than enough space on the right unused.
It's strange, I find the complete opposite to be true. A narrower font allows my brain to grasp the line quicker, without having to move my eyes as much.
That's how I think about it too. I use Anka/Coder Narrow. It takes some getting used to, but may enable using an additional editor window at certain monitor sizes.
Another commenter replied that all editors have word wrap, but the resulting code doesn't look great, IMHO. I prefer full control.
For terminal/console use wide fonts hurt IMHO. I really like Iosevka, it even has a terminal optimized version that's explicitly less wide: https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
Since we are talking about our favourite coding fonts, my personal choice is on Comic Code. I find it very easy to read and better than the other mono comic sans fonts.
To wit, Comic Sans is recommended by the British Dyslexia Association and the Dyslexia Association of Ireland. An American Institute of Graphic Arts post from last summer said that it might be the best font for dyslexics, given its "character disambiguation" and "variation in letter heights". While other fonts have been specifically designed to be read by people with dyslexia — Dyslexie and OpenDyslexic are two — they just don’t have the availability of Comic Sans. To hate on Comic Sans is “ableist", Hudgins argues, and doing so discounts the reading difficulties of millions of people.
I honestly can't tell much difference between this, and the new "Cascadia Code" font that Microsoft recently put out. If they didn't put "Comic" in the name, then no one would likely think twice about it. On the other hand, the notoriety of that name probably helps them draw attention, too.
I’m really using this font everyday since about two years. I remember setting the font in vscode and testing comic sans ms for fun, just to see. To my surprise it wasn’t that bad for me but of course not monospaced. So I looked at monospaced fonts inspired by comic sans ms, you have a few free ones on GitHub, and I ended up with comic code relatively quick.
Oh, look at that, the Victor Mono homepage has a font comparison slider that allows you to compare it to MonoLisa! MonoLisa advertises that it's wider than other monospace fonts, and you can really see that in the comparison. One of the things I appreciate about Victor Mono is that it is narrower than many other monospace fonts (while still being very readable), allowing you to fit more code side-by-side.
In case you like narrow but Victor’s not your thing, I can enthusiastically point you towards Iosevka. (That’s also available in Victor’s comparison picker. Nice!)
Thanks for the victor mono recommendation. It looks really good! I was blown away by how narrow it was compared to other forms in the comparison tool.
Side note: it's a bummer that you never see Monaco on these comparison tools. Monaco has been my monospace font of choice for many years now despite never owning a Macbook: https://github.com/cseelus/monego
I, too, have a very strong preference for Monaco. I always wondered whether the font is indeed as great as I think it is, or whether I just like it so much, because I had already used it for 5-10 years before I ever consciously looked at other monospaced fonts. It's great to hear that you intentionally chose it without having already been adapted to it.
Serifs are known to be less readable on screens. Each to their own but to me that MonoLisa thing is sort of half-serif... it's ... inconsistent and terrible. Possibly a joke.
On low resolution screens, yes. If you have a 2k or better monitor I would encourage you to test this out again. I have found that serifs are now actually easier to read than non, for the same reasons they are easier to read on paper.
An interesting perspective with which I respectfully disagree. I have high dpi displays (who doesn't?) but prefer sans. I think it's near-universal these days. Everyone is using them for logos too. There's a reason: legibility, everywhere, including for non-native readers. In a global world, one must prioritize clarity. See https://design.tutsplus.com/articles/the-rise-of-the-sans-se... and https://developer.apple.com/fonts/
I read the links. I don't believe that brand designers are optimizing for legibility, unless there's some real study showing sans is easier to read body text with. Designers just follow trends that have nothing to do with user experiences. People switching logos to sans are the same types of people coming up with "Metamates"; just people chasing corporate dogmas.
That gwern page is mostly rambling IMHO. Yes, there is a documented association between serifs and trust, but it is weak and mostly tested in print IIRC. I think you may be throwing the baby (real and objective improvement) out with the bathwater (fads) in the design world. There is substance there. I suggest https://watchdocumentaries.com/helvetica/
I don't know why anyone would even bother to even go beyond the first item on the list. Such beauty, such elegant geometry, such timeless classic lines. Truly an elegant font for a more civilized time.
BTW, I'm also a huge fan of Luxi Mono, but I edit it and add a dot in the middle of the zero to make it different from the O. I like it because it reminds me a bit of the Sun console font (which I always forget the name). I could also go with Go Mono, which is mostly the same, but has a slashed zero.
edit: if you hate my font, just don't use it. You don't have to downvote this. ;-)
Same about Luxi Mono. I have also added a dot. I used to program in old redhat linux with crt monitor. And at that time, it used to be the default font for terminals.
I don't think it necessarily peaked, but the IBM PC represents an inflection point - it was built on top of the office equipment more cozy aesthetics rather than the computer division's cleaner and minimalistic visual identity. The PC has a George Gershwin vibe while the terminals such as the 3278 have a definite Emerson, Lake and Palmer techo-utopia thing to it.
ooooo thanks for the recommendation. MonoLisa is pretty, but not $70 pretty. Especially when this is just as good (maybe better?) and I can just toss the author whatever I want.
Victor mono is definitely not my thing, but thanks for pointing it out. I am quite fickle with typefaces so maybe one day this one will be the one I use for a few months.
They're delightfully boring, are readable at smaller sizes, have a good Unicode support, don't seem to have ligatures so i don't have to bother disabling them (personal preference) and are completely free. Plus they can be used to work with code that has large information density (think legacy Java apps) without causing strain on my eyes due to their simple look.
Have been using Victor Mono for a year now, that Victor Mono demo on programmingfonts.org definitely does not look like what I'm used to. Looks like the medium weighted Victor Mono.
> being constrained by the same width of all glyphs can result in a boring or unreadable font.
I don't see how "boring" is an issue here. If the whole thing has a goal of functionality, why do I care if it's boring? And what is a "boring" font anyway?
Reminds me of the Apple-induced desire to call everything "stunning" or "beautiful."
> I don't see how "boring" is an issue here. If the whole thing has a goal of functionality, why do I care if it's boring?
Exactly. Or actually, to go even further: On the contrary, "boring" may well be an issue, but in the sense that that's what we want. When you write code -- or prose, marketing copy, poetry, whatever -- what you want to concentrate on is the content of your text, not the esthetic of the letterforms. "Boring" is the opposite of "captures your attention", and if I want to focus my attention on the meaning of groups of letters, "boring" -- not grabbing my attention -- is exactly what I want the shapes of the letters themselves to be.
And yes, I want them all to be the same width, so I can line up repetitive bits of code (or poetry?) below each other and match -- catch -- the non-repetitive bits at a glance. (Sorry, we can't all write in bone-DRY functional languages; SQL is pretty damn verbose and often, yes, repetitive.) IMO that's part of the content I want to focus on.
Another day, another Letter Gothic lookalike "developer font". I do not feel particularly motivated to switch away from the terminal bitmap fonts I normally use. There's something about an 8x8, 8x16, or similar small numbers grid of pixels -- the constraints seemed to breed creativity that you don't see too much of anymore in monospaced fonts for coding/terminal use.
My favorite font still remains fantasque sans mono. It's loosely based on comic sans, I just need a little playful edge in my coding job. Otherwise it gets too stale.
> As software developers, we always strive for better tools but rarely consider font as such.
Meanwhile, I look at new coding fonts on at least a monthly basis. Nothing beats Input Mono [^1] for me; I actually like wider fonts, so I might take this one out for a spin.
Do people really care that much about editor fonts? I just use SF Mono and call it a day. I've never had a problem where the font, of all things, was the main cause of something not working for me.
If you're looking your day at nothing else but text it's the most obvious thing to spend time and money on to improve. Sure, it's an utilitarian thing at the end of the day, but why should it not look pleasant to your eyes?
I don't think I ever had _a problem_ with a font, but that does not mean I do not want to spend a bit of time and effort to improve my experience. I could probably also get away with a much worse keyboard or monitor and be just as productive. But would I enjoy it just as much? Probably not.
I'm not sure what you're referring to. The font is a one time purchase and significantly cheaper than a new monitor. Both things (a better monitor and a better font) can make you enjoy the things you're doing more.
Yes, there might be billions of free fonts out there, but the cost of that font is also not exactly making a huge impact for me that I have to save money there. Why would I start saving with the font all the sudden when I spend more money on literally everything else? Does not really compute to me.
It’s definitely something some people care about, although I am certainly in the camp of not caring at all. I have no idea what font my IDE uses, and I have never thought about changing it.
No, sorry fontographers, but I can't tell the difference between the scores of mono fonts created in the last half dozen years. As long as it's kinda pleasing and can easily see the differences between () and {}, 1iIlL| and oO0, I'm all set.
I wonder how many people glancing at the landing page have browsed over to the download page, and discovered that this a paid font? To the tune of $69 to $239, depending on the options you want.
If this were something really revolutionary, then okay. But this looks like every other Bitstream Vera Sans Mono variant, just tweaked to be a touch wider than Fira Code or Jetbrains Mono. But half of the fonts on https://www.programmingfonts.org are Bitstream Vera Sans Mono variants, a touch wider than Fira Code or Jetbrains Mono. And they're all open source and free.
People charging $199 for a slightly wider Lucida Console, you can't make this shit up. The marketing is so outrageous.
In case someone's seriously considering this, here are an additional two sites that have literally hundreds of CC0 and other free to use fonts, not just monospace:
I love the DIN family but haven't been able to find a monospaced variant for coding/terminal use. I'd add Abstract Fonts[1] to the list, though you have to watch the license (many are only free for personal/non-commercial use).
I wanted to let you know I'm upvoting you, not for the useful links you have provided, but because I also love DIN, to an unreasonable degree, like the kind of feeling that makes someone otherwise totally rational marry a pokemon.
When I was about 20, after the Berlin wall came down, I rode my bike round berlin, then all round east then west Germany for three months, sleeping rough in the forest most of the time, and I think the font, on road signs everywhere, soaked into me as linked to that summer.
But you know what really creeps me about this font. It has a history dating back to the start of the 20th century as letterforms for hand painted signs, but Deutsche Industrienorm 1451 was created in 1936, the year of the of the Berlin Olympics, concentration camps had been open for three years, Triumph of the Will was released the year before. If you've never seen 'Triumph of the Will' it's an experience, I'd never understood how the fascists had managed to appeal to enough people to actually win an election, but in that film you see how they presented themselves to the people of Germany at the time and it was sophisticated. There's a moment in the film in which hilter interacts with an unemployed labourer, and in that interaction he imbues this guy with a sense of purpose, hitler has told him he is a soldier - a soldier with a shovel, it's nonsense, but it is carefully crafted nonsense. It seems to me that DIN is part of this carefully crafted propaganda, a tool to help project an vision of Nazi Germany as rational, orderly, scientific, rigorous and correct. And it does the job, like the unemployed labourer, I respond to it exactly the way goebbels would want me to.
I know I can use a Roman road without endorsing the invasion of Gaul, but there's still a horror there millennia later.
> There's a moment in the film in which hilter interacts with an unemployed labourer, and in that interaction he imbues this guy with a sense of purpose, hitler has told him he is a soldier - a soldier with a shovel, it's nonsense, but it is carefully crafted nonsense.
That's more or less what I'm trying to say, the little morsel of self esteem given to labourer, the sense of purpose and inclusion, comes tangled up in an insane and horrific ideology, if he wants to eat that morsel he needs to swallow the other part too. So the strategy isn't nonsense, it's nasty, but not nonsense. The human need for inclusion and self esteem is real, responding that need is real, the nonsense is the mythology in which that response is served.
IMO, this is one of the rare programming fonts that actually looks great to me. I use Operator which is also a paid font. I used Source Code Pro for a short while and never really like any of the other free offerings.
It looks like a lovely font, a shame about the price.
They have, however, included it into their website and distributed it to my browser for free, without asking me first:
https://www.monolisa.dev/api/fonts/initial
According to the EULA the font is now mine under the term "by downloading the software accompanying this license".
Also, how many people who regularly browse HN have seen a headline like "[Font Name] - A font designed for developers"? As a mild font nerd, I love that people keep making more fonts. But also:
I am the only one who finds fonts a bit expensive for personal use? It is not a rant, I am not saying it isn't worth it, that font designers can't make money, etc... But that puts it on the same level as tools like Sublime Text or Beyond Compare. For me, it is enough of a turn off not to use a commercial font, especially considering that the free offering is quite good.
I totally understand the higher price for commercial use, here, it is cheap compared to the costs of hiring a designer, and it may have a real impact on your sales and ultimately earn you money.
But why is the price for personal use around $60? Is it some kind of a sweet spot because most people won't buy fonts anyways, even for $1, but those who do expect to pay that kind of money. Does it account for piracy, which I guess is easy and goes unnoticed if you only use it personally?
Selling font direct to consumers is extremely bad business model. This doesn’t work. People are not keen on shelling out 100s of dollars when IDEs already come with decent fonts and other thousands of free fonts readily available. This font looks great but most people would argue about marginal benefit. I would hope they would partner with IDE makers and big tech and give them license to use it for their expected revenue instead.
Sorry, but no IDE comes with a proper 3278-like font. Not even IBM's Developer for z/OS comes with one (they commissioned that other font called Plex... who would take seriously a font named after a media player?).
That is delightful. I remember using 3270's back in "the lab" in high school ("alt-pf2" twice to compile!), and marveling at the individual phosphors on the screen. (When I could see better, for sure.)
I also think creators of this font likely have not performed any market testing or studied price-revenue curves. I might take a bet that $5 flat price would produce higher revenues. Another option for them is to bundle many such fonts by forming group with other creators together. That has higher chance of selling a professional fonts as package to IDE makers and big tech.
Careful what you say about copyright. While this might be true (up to some degree) in the USA & Japan, it’s definitely not true in many other countries (e.g. Germany, France, Russia & the UK).
In the US it might also be possible to protect a font design with a design patent, so even there you should be careful about assuming it’s safe to copy a font’s design…
The font is used on the web page itself. You can trivially yoink it out of there and install it on your system if you really like it. I doubt anyone ever pays for fonts for personal use.
Wow, the pricing changes my perspective quite a bit. I wouldn't have even considered paying $5 for a font. Think it's just one of those things I'm used to not having to pay for.
I guess if you find the current free offerings problematic then $55 is nothing for prolonged comfort if it does what it says on the tin.
For me i've always found the default in VSC on OSX to be really nice.
Tried ligatures once but it just became confusing tbh
A while back, I wanted to try MonoLisa out for a bit before spending all of the money on it. I ended up finding the .zip on a shady website after some creative searching and used it for about a month.
I tried to switch back to another font and found that I was actually really enjoying MonoLisa... I ended up just spending the money since I felt a bit guilty staring at it for 8+ hours a day without paying the creators. Now, installing it is one of my first steps when setting up a new environment.
Yeah, unfortunately I can't really see a viable use case for professional (i.e. paid for) fonts for personal use. Like you, I understand that font designers need to make money, but there's just not $60+ of value in a font for me, particularly one where my reaction is "oh, this seems like it might be marginally better than my current font, maybe I'll check it out".
It's just barely hitting the potential value where I'm willing to hit the download button, tacking on another $60 on top of that is just a complete non-starter for me. And trying to make money by shame (i.e. font makers deserve money) doesn't seem like it's viable long-term.
No, you aren't. I sympathize with them. Its a lot of work to create, and they should get their money's worth. But it takes time for me to decide whether I really like a font, and I'm not going to pay $60 for the chance to figure that out. I wouldn't pay $6 either, though I might if I had more money to spend care-freely.
Would be wonderful if they could charge 1/x cents per character used up until some fixed price point. but what an intrusive business model that would be.
I looked at it a few years ago and dismissed it because it’s so similar to Source Code Pro in terms of spacing, size and overall feel. Source Code Pro is an excellent wide font that I’ve been using since its release about a decade ago. And it’s free, and there are Nerd Font variants with ligatures if you’re into that.
I noticed that MonaLisa added script variant last year, so if you want something like that in your editor it’s a very good choice. In fact, I’d recommend it over Operator Mono (the OG monospaced font with scripted italics), because the later has a much smaller character set.
Or, pick a free Victor Mono if you like narrower symbols. Alas, us - wide font users - have to pay for a script italics :)
293 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadIf I was not down to pay for a font, then I'd probably use one of Iosevka's forms. Personally, however, it became clear to me that just like my monitor, the font I spend hours looking at every day is also worth some money.
https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/
I like narrow fonts. Barlow is excellent. News Gothic is fantastic. Geo Grotesque is super beautiful. But it just doesn't work for me when a coding font is narrow. Fonts like Iosevka and Pragmata are harder to read than needed and for no clear benefit. Especially when used for projects based on C and derivatives. If you ever find yourself needing to cram more symbols per line onto your screen, it's a sign that there's a coding style problem! Lines simply should be short enough to not require horizontal compression.
Obviously, YMMV, to each their own, etc.
I like the narrower font so I can fit two side-by-side files with full 120 character width each on a regular 16:9 display. Iosevka is likely my forever font. I find it both beautiful and fit for purpose; I couldn't ask for more.
Re: "lines should be short." I prefer my code font to work even for bad code. It's not always my code that I'm looking at!
It even has a Pragmata Pro Style.
[1] - https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
[2] - https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka
My takeaway is that monospaced fonts are basically a solved problem thanks to Iosevka. It does everything. And you can mix and match individual glyphs to your exact preferences!
I stopped hopping monospace fonts when I discovered Go Mono. Go Mono does not seem to get blurry even at small sizes. M, m, n always look impeccable. Not so here.
I'm not sure. Maybe something is wrong with the text-rendering in my browser.
https://www.programmingfonts.org/#go-mono
A serif monospace font that doesn't look it came from a typewriter? Very little separation between letters? A font made for specifically for typesetting one programming language? It really doesn't seem like it should work, but it does for me. I have it installed as the system monospace font on every computer I can.
I think it increases readability. I need to read what I'm looking at, not a lot of things I'm not looking at.
Also word wrappings will lose all the preceding tabs. It makes it 100x harder to read.
The issue is I will have less split space.
This depends on your editor. I know VS Code supports indentation/alignment of wrapped words. I believe Emacs and Vim support it as well.
I don't think that's enough of a reason to say the design choice is a sin for everyone.
"But then I can't see as many windows!" That brings us back to the GP's I need to see what I'm looking at, not what I'm not looking at". When you want to look at those other windows, bring them to the foreground and let them obscure this one.
Another commenter replied that all editors have word wrap, but the resulting code doesn't look great, IMHO. I prefer full control.
https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/anka-coder-narrow
https://tosche.net/fonts/comic-code
To wit, Comic Sans is recommended by the British Dyslexia Association and the Dyslexia Association of Ireland. An American Institute of Graphic Arts post from last summer said that it might be the best font for dyslexics, given its "character disambiguation" and "variation in letter heights". While other fonts have been specifically designed to be read by people with dyslexia — Dyslexie and OpenDyslexic are two — they just don’t have the availability of Comic Sans. To hate on Comic Sans is “ableist", Hudgins argues, and doing so discounts the reading difficulties of millions of people.
https://www.thecut.com/2020/08/the-reason-comic-sans-is-a-pu...
MonoLisa seems to fall into a similar category. Is there a name for this style?
While I'm here: Victor Mono has been my programming font of choice for a while now: https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/
Oh, look at that, the Victor Mono homepage has a font comparison slider that allows you to compare it to MonoLisa! MonoLisa advertises that it's wider than other monospace fonts, and you can really see that in the comparison. One of the things I appreciate about Victor Mono is that it is narrower than many other monospace fonts (while still being very readable), allowing you to fit more code side-by-side.
In case you like narrow but Victor’s not your thing, I can enthusiastically point you towards Iosevka. (That’s also available in Victor’s comparison picker. Nice!)
Side note: it's a bummer that you never see Monaco on these comparison tools. Monaco has been my monospace font of choice for many years now despite never owning a Macbook: https://github.com/cseelus/monego
Serifs are known to be less readable on screens. Each to their own but to me that MonoLisa thing is sort of half-serif... it's ... inconsistent and terrible. Possibly a joke.
Some data: https://www.gwern.net/AB-testing#fonts
https://www.programmingfonts.org/#font3270
BTW, I'm also a huge fan of Luxi Mono, but I edit it and add a dot in the middle of the zero to make it different from the O. I like it because it reminds me a bit of the Sun console font (which I always forget the name). I could also go with Go Mono, which is mostly the same, but has a slashed zero.
edit: if you hate my font, just don't use it. You don't have to downvote this. ;-)
[1] https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
I think it is wild that so many of us have these very strong, yet radically different, opinions.
This is an aside but it makes it really difficult to me to enjoy when the site requires javascript to show me a typeface.
https://github.com/braver/programmingfonts
edit: ahhh it's a paid font.
so nope
My own favorite programming fonts of choice at the time are either Liberation Mono (https://www.programmingfonts.org/#liberation) or Cousine (https://www.programmingfonts.org/#cousine) the latter of which builds upon the former.
They're delightfully boring, are readable at smaller sizes, have a good Unicode support, don't seem to have ligatures so i don't have to bother disabling them (personal preference) and are completely free. Plus they can be used to work with code that has large information density (think legacy Java apps) without causing strain on my eyes due to their simple look.
This is actually awesome, thank you for sharing!
I don't see how "boring" is an issue here. If the whole thing has a goal of functionality, why do I care if it's boring? And what is a "boring" font anyway?
Reminds me of the Apple-induced desire to call everything "stunning" or "beautiful."
Exactly. Or actually, to go even further: On the contrary, "boring" may well be an issue, but in the sense that that's what we want. When you write code -- or prose, marketing copy, poetry, whatever -- what you want to concentrate on is the content of your text, not the esthetic of the letterforms. "Boring" is the opposite of "captures your attention", and if I want to focus my attention on the meaning of groups of letters, "boring" -- not grabbing my attention -- is exactly what I want the shapes of the letters themselves to be.
And yes, I want them all to be the same width, so I can line up repetitive bits of code (or poetry?) below each other and match -- catch -- the non-repetitive bits at a glance. (Sorry, we can't all write in bone-DRY functional languages; SQL is pretty damn verbose and often, yes, repetitive.) IMO that's part of the content I want to focus on.
Love the font
https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans
Meanwhile, I look at new coding fonts on at least a monthly basis. Nothing beats Input Mono [^1] for me; I actually like wider fonts, so I might take this one out for a spin.
[^1]: https://input.djr.com/
I don't think I ever had _a problem_ with a font, but that does not mean I do not want to spend a bit of time and effort to improve my experience. I could probably also get away with a much worse keyboard or monitor and be just as productive. But would I enjoy it just as much? Probably not.
Yes, there might be billions of free fonts out there, but the cost of that font is also not exactly making a huge impact for me that I have to save money there. Why would I start saving with the font all the sudden when I spend more money on literally everything else? Does not really compute to me.
If this were something really revolutionary, then okay. But this looks like every other Bitstream Vera Sans Mono variant, just tweaked to be a touch wider than Fira Code or Jetbrains Mono. But half of the fonts on https://www.programmingfonts.org are Bitstream Vera Sans Mono variants, a touch wider than Fira Code or Jetbrains Mono. And they're all open source and free.
In case someone's seriously considering this, here are an additional two sites that have literally hundreds of CC0 and other free to use fonts, not just monospace:
https://www.1001freefonts.com
http://allfont.net
DIN 1451 Mittelschrift is my personal favorite.
[1] https://www.abstractfonts.com/
https://www.nerdfonts.com/
When I was about 20, after the Berlin wall came down, I rode my bike round berlin, then all round east then west Germany for three months, sleeping rough in the forest most of the time, and I think the font, on road signs everywhere, soaked into me as linked to that summer.
But you know what really creeps me about this font. It has a history dating back to the start of the 20th century as letterforms for hand painted signs, but Deutsche Industrienorm 1451 was created in 1936, the year of the of the Berlin Olympics, concentration camps had been open for three years, Triumph of the Will was released the year before. If you've never seen 'Triumph of the Will' it's an experience, I'd never understood how the fascists had managed to appeal to enough people to actually win an election, but in that film you see how they presented themselves to the people of Germany at the time and it was sophisticated. There's a moment in the film in which hilter interacts with an unemployed labourer, and in that interaction he imbues this guy with a sense of purpose, hitler has told him he is a soldier - a soldier with a shovel, it's nonsense, but it is carefully crafted nonsense. It seems to me that DIN is part of this carefully crafted propaganda, a tool to help project an vision of Nazi Germany as rational, orderly, scientific, rigorous and correct. And it does the job, like the unemployed labourer, I respond to it exactly the way goebbels would want me to.
I know I can use a Roman road without endorsing the invasion of Gaul, but there's still a horror there millennia later.
Well, maybe not total nonsense? The same kind of thing seems to have worked elsewhere too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration
According to the EULA the font is now mine under the term "by downloading the software accompanying this license".
Correct me if I'm wrong please. /s
I saved the EULA in case your interpretation is accurate and the EULA changes.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I totally understand the higher price for commercial use, here, it is cheap compared to the costs of hiring a designer, and it may have a real impact on your sales and ultimately earn you money.
But why is the price for personal use around $60? Is it some kind of a sweet spot because most people won't buy fonts anyways, even for $1, but those who do expect to pay that kind of money. Does it account for piracy, which I guess is easy and goes unnoticed if you only use it personally?
Luckily, everyone can get one at https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font.
Note: shameless plug ;-)
https://github.com/rbanffy/selectric-mode
It is nothing rational, just a buyer's reaction to a product and its price.
In the US it might also be possible to protect a font design with a design patent, so even there you should be careful about assuming it’s safe to copy a font’s design…
I guess if you find the current free offerings problematic then $55 is nothing for prolonged comfort if it does what it says on the tin.
For me i've always found the default in VSC on OSX to be really nice.
Tried ligatures once but it just became confusing tbh
I tried to switch back to another font and found that I was actually really enjoying MonoLisa... I ended up just spending the money since I felt a bit guilty staring at it for 8+ hours a day without paying the creators. Now, installing it is one of my first steps when setting up a new environment.
It's just barely hitting the potential value where I'm willing to hit the download button, tacking on another $60 on top of that is just a complete non-starter for me. And trying to make money by shame (i.e. font makers deserve money) doesn't seem like it's viable long-term.
Would be wonderful if they could charge 1/x cents per character used up until some fixed price point. but what an intrusive business model that would be.
I noticed that MonaLisa added script variant last year, so if you want something like that in your editor it’s a very good choice. In fact, I’d recommend it over Operator Mono (the OG monospaced font with scripted italics), because the later has a much smaller character set.
Or, pick a free Victor Mono if you like narrower symbols. Alas, us - wide font users - have to pay for a script italics :)