At a risk of sounding unfriendly, the best way I know is to look at them side by side.
They are different fonts.
A lot of good looking mono fonts look very similar and there is a reason for that. As designers fine tune features for better legibility (main concern with terminal typeface) fonts converge to look roughly the same. But they still have different feel when you get a lot of text on a screen.
A very distinctive feature of Berkeley Mono seems to be the squared-circle used in the rounded characters, where Roboto has very circular characters. I'm sure there a lot more differences if I saw them side-by-side, but that's the most obvious one for this font snob.
But I’m glad you asked. Learn about how font characters are structured[0]. Then zoom in, inspect and compare the details of a few characters from both fonts. This will help you understand how they’re different.
I very much welcome the new wave of mono fonts being developed recently. As a visually impaired person who has issues differentiating fonts on different backgrounds, the variety of fonts is very important as it allows me to find the optimal font for the environment and color contrast. Mono variety used to be limited but I can see a renaissance now!
I rarely get excited by fonts, but I'm loving this one. I only recently realized how long machine readable fonts have been around while working on a reproduction of the Apollo 11 flight plan. I love how this one has some of their flavor while still being easy on the eyes.
I am personally not a fan of ligatures, but since they seem to be entirely optional and controlled by the IDE, I think it would be nice to see them included. For people not like me, because it won't hurt me, and will broaden the appeal.
Because the user is typically looking at the center of a screen.
Sure, you can organize you windows in a way to compensate and center the content manually. But I think there are two usage patterns:
1. maximized browser windows
2. non maximized windows
For the first pattern, the above statement is essential. Naturally, the user is looking at the center of the screen. The second pattern is somewhat unpredictable, because you neither know where the window is on the screen nor the size of it. But the typical behavior for centering content (`margin: 0 auto;`) does not make any difference compared to left aligned content when the window is smaller than the content. The only hard to judge situation is, when the window is not maximized, but larger than the content and I think for that case it is pretty hard to judge if left aligned or centered content is superior.
I really like the font, but I doubt that a claim of “wide language support” can be made when Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and other scripts are not supported.
ISO 8859-1 Latin-1 Western European
ISO 8859-2 Latin-2 Central European
ISO 8859-3 Latin-3 South European
ISO 8859-4 Latin-4 North European
ISO 8859-9 Latin-5 Turkish
ISO 8859-10 Latin-6 Nordic
ISO 8859-13 Latin-7 Baltic Rim
ISO 8859-15 Latin-9 Finnish, Estonian
ISO 8859-16 Latin-10 South-Eastern European
I can only really judge a font when its loaded in my system, running in my setup. I wish font makers targeting developers would release trial fonts (with some essential chars missing or similar), so that we could test them properly before paying.
I am always looking for a better font, and this one looks like it may be an improvement over my current one.
Thanks and good feedback, beta testing was done in a similar way - font cut with a few missing glyphs and was limited to ASCII-basic set. I'll see if I can extend this more generally.
I'd second the vote for some "testing" fonts. At the very least, could you include some screenshots of larger chunks of code, with {} etc? I can't really tell how this will look on a screen full of code.
The same think happens with this font, as with some many others. It's absolutely beautiful, it looks like it was just designed for coding. Then I see actual code written with the font and goes: "Well, that was disappointing".
Don't get me wrong, it beautiful, easy to read and the price is right (in my opinion), but when you see the Python, even at 17pt, it seems squished. The characters just blurs together. This font either requires insane amounts of whitespace around it, or a high font size, I'm guessing no less than 20pt. Maybe it's just the line height that makes it weird, the characters seems like they need to be wider to avoid losing details.
Send me an email[1] and I can send you a beta copy to try out. IMO the picture doesn't do the justice (it is not like the way you describe it at all), but I am seriously considering creating a specific license for a trial + font cut that is missing a few glyphs. That's going to take some time. Here is some feedback from this thread :) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30559060
Of course, I use it daily for writing code but I am biased :)
Trial versions are ready and already sent to the mailing list! Please send us an email if you want to try now. Should be generally available on the website this week.
I agree, although I'm not sure if it's partly an unflattering screenshot. To me some of the lowercase letters look a bit indistinct (especially the 'e's and 'a's).
Yes please - in my case because fonts look different on Windows and Mac (and Linux?) and I've been caught a few times after buying fonts that looked great only to discover all screenshots were from Macs and on Windows it was nothing like it.
One idea to consider... offer the font but with the vowels jumbled around and the digits jumbled around. I can see everything I need. But would need to buy it if I really want to use it.
My thoughts exactly. Berkeley Mono looks great on the website and in the PDF data sheet, but the real test is how does it look in my terminal and editor, especially when compared side-by-side with my current preferred font (Pragmata Pro; also commercial but well worth it!)
I purchased Berkeley Mono to give it a shot. While I found it visually appealing, it still cannot compete in the terminal against Pragmata Pro due to how narrow Pragmata Pro is. I can fit so much more on my screen yet still have it be clean and legible with Pragmata Pro.
We've been working on a condensed version, it has been almost complete (all 440+ glyphs) since last year but it has a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out. This will also enable a Width ('wdth') axis on variable fonts so if your editor supports, can smoothly go from Regular ---> Condensed ---> Compressed versions.
There is also a complete Extended version but it has many issues, we won't be releasing that anytime soon.
MonoLisa has a playground where you can paste code snippets and try the font - that might be a good approach for other fonts aimed at developers. https://www.monolisa.dev/playground
MonoLisa also has a trial version. [1] They have a great site, I love the font, and the availability of a free trial was the icing on the cake. Great experience all around.
Nope, you didn't miss anything. The license is $75 for the developer package, you use it unlimited times, anywhere you want (except commercial use) and you get unlimited updates.
I was excited for it, but I cannot justify the price.
I may however consider the $25/year for commercial use if I ever want to use it.
You know those pictures where it says "the longer you look the worse it gets" - this is the opposite of that. The longer I look at this site, the more I love it.
I like the typeface but I think it would be helpful to have a way for someone to copy and paste their code as a preview but I think that if you allowed that then others could download your font for free. You might want to mention that it costs $75 above the fold and I would think that you would want also to center the column of the site itself (these are nitpicks though).
One option to allow users to preview the font while not letting them download it for free is to have them submit their code sample, render an image of it on the server, then send that back to the user. Not as nice as rendering the font in browser, of course, but it works.
I was thinking that but others also mentioned to have a trial mode font that didn’t have a complete character set also. Rendering a picture might become costly.
> Berkeley Mono wears a UNIX T-shirt and aspires to be etched on control panels in black synthetic lacquer. It is Adrian Frutiger visits Bell Labs. It is Gene Kranz's command. It operates with calibrated precision and has a datasheet.
It costs $75 for an individual license, not really in the spirit of UNIX
Yeah, every time a typeface is shared on here it is met with some opposition since most cost money for individuals/personal use. I understand it's hard to take the time to design a nice typeface and that the creators should be compensated for their work, but sadly it means fonts like these are practically limited to commercial use. I wonder if there's a better way to turn a profit on typefaces - there's been a handful of really interesting ones posted on HN I've wanted to try.
There is a ton of entitlement nowadays, that's for sure.
One should be grateful to those who do release their hard work to the public domain or under a FOSS license, rather than being resentful toward those who don't.
People absolutely deserve to be compensated for their work, if they so choose, and they are absolutely permitted to release their work under any license they want.
I think the problem is more that the costs feel exorbitant with respect to both the perceived effort and utility. 75$ is half a year of Netflix - a product clearly born of extensive multi-disciplinary effort - which can't but feel excessive given that the marginal utility of a font is just so low.
I guess I could summarize as saying that an expensive[0] font just isn't, or more strongly, can't be interesting.[1]
[0]More than a cup of coffee, or so.
[1]For personal use, marginal benefits scale differently on e.g. a billboard
Netflix is entertainment, typefaces have a LOT more utility in my life. Maybe I'm weird because I regularly purchase typefaces but $75 is a STEAL. Holy shit.
The commercial license for this is also a steal.
Seems like on here, free typefaces are desired but a lot of these free typefaces are released by multi-million dollar corporations...they have someone on payroll to work on them.
I totally get why they charge, and for what they do - can't blame anyone for not working for free - I just genuinely can't picture a value proposition in the product commiserate with the effort.
At least personally, I find fonts are something that normalize very quickly. If I change the font on my text editor, I'd notice for a day or so but then it would cease to be 'a font' and go back to being 'words on screen'. I've only really noticed 'displeasure' at a working font[1] when I've got two machines and the settings wind up desynced so one doesn't look like 'how it's supposed to' according to my brain.
[0]e.g. if Hacker News changed its font I really might not notice.
You might be interested in futurefonts.xyz. Kind of like Kickstarter for fonts. You pay for typefaces in development. Price goes up as more features and components get added but you get everything that’s included when you buy it and then everything that’s added afterward for no additional cost.
One downside of futurefonts.xyz is that each font comes with a different license. Bit of a headache to keep track of the individual Terms & Conditions as a typical user who might want to use a couple of fonts in a project. Really wish that fonts were sold under more standardized commercial licenses.
At least with many open & free fonts, the SIL Open Font License is practically the standard.
> It costs $75 for an individual license, not really in the spirit of UNIX
Eh, I think it’s a fair price, a. And b, pretty apt when you consider most Unixes were priced per core. BSD/OS itself was $1000 back in the day, according to my research, which was cheaper than System V, but obviously still expensive.
Linux was created for a reason.
And here I’ll refrain from making a snarky remark about how someone should make a similar font that is lower quality but will be way more popular.
UNIX was an internal and then commercial product of ATT bell labs (and later Novell). You're misconstruing it with the FOSS movement.
UNIX was created for ATT to sell more telephone service, and then later sold and licensed to other companies to likewise improve their internal computer usage. UNIX was not created to be zero cost. Apparently a commercial license for UNIX cost $20k at the time (or $150 for universities/educational institutions).
edit: IMHO $75 one time is a fair price for a premium font. Designers regularly pay $300 or more for typefaces they use in their work. There are monthly subscriptions to font foundries that cost more too.
It was certainly not created to sell more telephone service. It was a research project that found applications to run on it, most of which had little if anything to do with telephone service at first. Much later UNIX was adapted to run telephone network equipment.
Big if true! Acoustic coupler modems had only existed for a few years when Unix development started, and ARPANET was starting around the same time. It would be an impressive amount of foresight if they predicted that demand for computer networking would become high and that existing OS's would be somehow ill-suited for running its infrastructure.
There were an enormous amount of problems in the telephone space that they hoped computers would resolve, like replacing the army of human operators with computer controlled switches.
AT&T was in the business of selling telephone service. Bell labs (AT&T owned) was where UNIX was created. Why else would AT&T be researching computer systems if not to broaden and improve their marketshare in telecommunications?
My understanding of Bell Labs is that it was funded via a 1% flat "tax" on all Bell System operating companies, and that internally it had no central mission. That's why all kinds of non-telecommunication advancements have come from it: radio astronomy, DNA sequencing machines, solar cells, etc.
I can't find an article for it, but I remember reading somewhere that AT&T's extravagant research budget and forays outside of telecommunications were partially a defensive maneuver: AT&T was aware that the US government could dismantle its monopoly at any moment, and invested heavily in R&D as a token of good faith.
You should read Kernighan’s “UNIX A History and a Memoir”. Seriously a great book.
UNIX was created with no purpose in mind other than to get some MULTICS-like functionality out of an old machine and not worry about design-by-committee.
The first real use for it was document processing and it took off from there. Never was a telecom system ever at AT&T AFAIK and didn’t do networking until much later.
There were no “teams” there, just someone would see what someone else was working on and dive in to help. Stick a bunch of smart people in a building and see what comes out.
R&D at Bell Labs was to play with ideas first and then find an application. That’s how we got the transistor and UNIX, and waaaay more things that never saw the light of day.
That mode of R&D is dead now. It was dying even as UNIX was being developed, and they got management cover. The use for speeding up technical documentation really was the first business value justification. That was also how they managed to get the PDP-11 and how C got created for the port.
The historical origin that I learned for UNIX was that it was created mostly out of frustration with Multics, and that its original "primary" use was running one of Ken Thompson's video games[1]. It was originally written for a PDP-7, which was already obsolete at the time and probably wasn't a target for telecommunications software.
It was only much later (and after significant arm twisting for more computing resources) that AT&T took UNIX seriously. Even then, the first marketed versions of UNIX were oriented towards programmers and technical editors, not telecommunication[2].
I wasn’t there, but I’ve heard that the AT&T-initiated compiler “debundling” was the thing that kick-started the popularity of the GNU userland, with GCC acting as the gateway drug. So not only are these facts related, they are apparently even causally so.
I do not have any problems paying for something that I will use several hours every day. But would like to try the font in my editor before purchasing.
Could have a demo download that only contains the most common letters like A-z0-9 and the brackets etc ([{:,.-_|&! Sure many will use the "demo" forever, but those people might be future customers and mouth-to-mouth marketers
181 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadThey are different fonts.
A lot of good looking mono fonts look very similar and there is a reason for that. As designers fine tune features for better legibility (main concern with terminal typeface) fonts converge to look roughly the same. But they still have different feel when you get a lot of text on a screen.
But I’m glad you asked. Learn about how font characters are structured[0]. Then zoom in, inspect and compare the details of a few characters from both fonts. This will help you understand how they’re different.
[0] https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-1/typ...
I love the little niceties of rendering arrows which are used all over the place these days.
I use PragmataPro and have done for many years. It's pretty similar to this but has lots of nice ligatures.
I like the limited width and left aligned text is also good, but IMHO the content as a whole should be in the center of the web page.
Sure, you can organize you windows in a way to compensate and center the content manually. But I think there are two usage patterns:
1. maximized browser windows
2. non maximized windows
For the first pattern, the above statement is essential. Naturally, the user is looking at the center of the screen. The second pattern is somewhat unpredictable, because you neither know where the window is on the screen nor the size of it. But the typical behavior for centering content (`margin: 0 auto;`) does not make any difference compared to left aligned content when the window is smaller than the content. The only hard to judge situation is, when the window is not maximized, but larger than the content and I think for that case it is pretty hard to judge if left aligned or centered content is superior.
Current support:
I am always looking for a better font, and this one looks like it may be an improvement over my current one.
I'll plan for a nice page with various languages and full page screenshots.
Edit: Fixed link, thanks.
The owner of this website (neil.computer) does not allow hotlinking to that resource (/content/images/2022/02/Artboard-5.png).
Better yet, make a trial version of the font available.
Don't get me wrong, it beautiful, easy to read and the price is right (in my opinion), but when you see the Python, even at 17pt, it seems squished. The characters just blurs together. This font either requires insane amounts of whitespace around it, or a high font size, I'm guessing no less than 20pt. Maybe it's just the line height that makes it weird, the characters seems like they need to be wider to avoid losing details.
Of course, I use it daily for writing code but I am biased :)
[1] neil@berkeleygraphics.com
There is also a complete Extended version but it has many issues, we won't be releasing that anytime soon.
[I am not affiliated with MonoLisa]
https://www.monolisa.dev/buy/661578
But to try it in my editor it seems I need to buy a $75 license first. Is there another free download button I missed?
I was excited for it, but I cannot justify the price.
I may however consider the $25/year for commercial use if I ever want to use it.
I’m also a big fan of the design of the author’s website: https://neil.computer/
[1]: https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/latin-modern-mono
This is would be the perfect application of it.
It costs $75 for an individual license, not really in the spirit of UNIX
One should be grateful to those who do release their hard work to the public domain or under a FOSS license, rather than being resentful toward those who don't.
People absolutely deserve to be compensated for their work, if they so choose, and they are absolutely permitted to release their work under any license they want.
I guess I could summarize as saying that an expensive[0] font just isn't, or more strongly, can't be interesting.[1]
[0]More than a cup of coffee, or so. [1]For personal use, marginal benefits scale differently on e.g. a billboard
The commercial license for this is also a steal.
Seems like on here, free typefaces are desired but a lot of these free typefaces are released by multi-million dollar corporations...they have someone on payroll to work on them.
I welcome indie typographers.
At least personally, I find fonts are something that normalize very quickly. If I change the font on my text editor, I'd notice for a day or so but then it would cease to be 'a font' and go back to being 'words on screen'. I've only really noticed 'displeasure' at a working font[1] when I've got two machines and the settings wind up desynced so one doesn't look like 'how it's supposed to' according to my brain.
[0]e.g. if Hacker News changed its font I really might not notice.
[1]Exempting crap like Papyrus
Then... don't buy it? I mean, it's not like there aren't hundreds of other fonts to choose from, many of which are free.
At least with many open & free fonts, the SIL Open Font License is practically the standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIL_Open_Font_License
Eh, I think it’s a fair price, a. And b, pretty apt when you consider most Unixes were priced per core. BSD/OS itself was $1000 back in the day, according to my research, which was cheaper than System V, but obviously still expensive.
Linux was created for a reason.
And here I’ll refrain from making a snarky remark about how someone should make a similar font that is lower quality but will be way more popular.
UNIX was created for ATT to sell more telephone service, and then later sold and licensed to other companies to likewise improve their internal computer usage. UNIX was not created to be zero cost. Apparently a commercial license for UNIX cost $20k at the time (or $150 for universities/educational institutions).
edit: IMHO $75 one time is a fair price for a premium font. Designers regularly pay $300 or more for typefaces they use in their work. There are monthly subscriptions to font foundries that cost more too.
Bell Labs did a tremendous amount of basic research, materials science, and things with no direct commercial application.
From where did you get this idea? Citation needed.
I can't find an article for it, but I remember reading somewhere that AT&T's extravagant research budget and forays outside of telecommunications were partially a defensive maneuver: AT&T was aware that the US government could dismantle its monopoly at any moment, and invested heavily in R&D as a token of good faith.
UNIX was created with no purpose in mind other than to get some MULTICS-like functionality out of an old machine and not worry about design-by-committee.
The first real use for it was document processing and it took off from there. Never was a telecom system ever at AT&T AFAIK and didn’t do networking until much later.
There were no “teams” there, just someone would see what someone else was working on and dive in to help. Stick a bunch of smart people in a building and see what comes out.
R&D at Bell Labs was to play with ideas first and then find an application. That’s how we got the transistor and UNIX, and waaaay more things that never saw the light of day.
That mode of R&D is dead now. It was dying even as UNIX was being developed, and they got management cover. The use for speeding up technical documentation really was the first business value justification. That was also how they managed to get the PDP-11 and how C got created for the port.
It was only much later (and after significant arm twisting for more computing resources) that AT&T took UNIX seriously. Even then, the first marketed versions of UNIX were oriented towards programmers and technical editors, not telecommunication[2].
[1]: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.pdf
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX
And that's before you even bought the compiler license!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univers
I admire the marketing copy very much!