Every so often I go on a “font bender” and start searching for my “next great coding font”. I’ve been using Hack (https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/) for several years, but after looking at this I might need to give it a try. It looks really nice and the price is right. The font in the OP looks great too, but I can’t bring myself to pay for it. Not when there’s so many great alternatives out there at no cost.
+100 I really dislike ligatures. They are one of those things that seem great in theory but I find them to be a real distraction. This is why I never got into the JetBrains fonts — there was no ligature-free option. (Maybe there is now, but I haven’t felt motivated to try it again.)
Source Code Pro is damn near perfect for me, I've been using it for some years. Occasionally I get an itch to explore other fonts, but I always come back to this one, all its refined details just feel good to my eyes.
One class of alternatives you could also consider is narrow fonts like PragmataPro[1] (commercial) or Iosevka[2] (gratis, FOSS). Being able to fit more stuff onto the screen side-by-side is what enabled me to get as much into tmux as I have.
super annoying web design from a graphic design company to show a typeface that purports its goal is to "get out of the way" so you can be productive, why not show some calm examples of text as in a terminal at a normal typesize? I had to zoom out to 60% just to tame it, and yet there was still blinking all over the place and nothing that approximated anything other than a phone screen.
does something about this typeface set it apart in a useful way from the zillion other free or default monospaced options? If anything it seemed a little awkward with the flourishes they added toward making it look fauxCR-able. (an artistic flourish I like as "zany graphic fun" but is it helpful for extended use?)
for the people who love it, I've no problem with enjoying flourishes, but it's calling itself serious. I'm serious and it's not taking me seriously.
$75 license. I assume they want people to be wow'ed by the unrealistic zoom shots, and pay money before realizing that it's little different from JetBrains Mono or Roboto Mono in a real-world editor or terminal.
This sort of comment is why I have a love/hate relationship with HN. Love, because yesterday I learned some amazing stuff that I told my partner about in bed.
Hate, because of the assumptions that so many people are so quick to jump to. You know nothing about this guy’s motivations. (His name’s Neil. I’ve spoken to him. He seems like a really solid dude. He probably has thicker skin than me.)
So you come in here and you imply that this thing is essentially a scam to rob you of $75. You imply that Neil is a scammer, trying to rob you of $75.
It’s really shitty and I wish people wouldn’t do it.
Edit: I’m not saying “don’t criticise the site”. If you don’t like the site, say so. But don’t criticise the motivations about which you know literally nothing.
Yup, lots of people here saying $75 is too much while they make multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, never once stopping to consider how much effort a product like this takes. The irony is palpable.
Very much agree. What's wrong with computer people that they won't spend money on tools?! Especially since they are made by people in their own industry. Machinists (aka metalworkers) wouldn't sneer at other machinists and refuse to purchase their tools because someone else in their own industry dared to charge someone money for it.
But the very same people will happily work for an advertising company under the guise of being a programmer and take a wage and bonus. Right on.
I agree with you on the general principle. That said, software is kind of an odd duck in that huge amounts of valuable code are just given away for free to whomever wants it. How much would you pay for a shell? A better ls command? A mailserver? All of those require considerable effort to create, and yet people have made wonderful implementations of each of those and said here ya go, have it, enjoy!
I can understand the skepticism against a paid font. There are some pretty grand ones available for free to anyone who'd like to use them. In this case, it was worth the premium to me to pay anyway. I don't think someone's automatically a cheapskate for thinking I'm nuts to buy a license.
> I can understand the skepticism against a paid font.
Me too! But that's not what upset me. What upset me was the assumption of deceit in the parent post.
It's like drive-by shootings here sometimes; people see a thing, they don't like it, and they assume that the person creating it therefore has bad motives. I've been on the receiving end, directly, and it stinks. It makes this place worse.
I’m with you. You don’t like a thing that other people do? Nod and move on. I made a different purchase with my money than they would have, and that’s fine. I’d do it again. It was an unnecessary luxury, but no more than the nice dinner I had last night, and I’m still enjoying the font today.
Coincidentally I read a comment today along the lines of “at HN, Cynicism-is-Intelligence” which really hit the nail on the head for me. This isn’t at all a nice community, overall.
Fair criticism about samples, launching new update and it'll have better samples. Also, you're welcome to download the trial—best way to see how it looks in your specific setup.
I don't agree with your take on flourishes (in better terms, artistry). Every typeface has it. The process of designing a typeface is full of subjectivity and artistry.
Woahhh, I've never played around with APL before. Such an interesting language: https://tryapl.org/
I think most of the glyphs are straightforward, the ones that would take time are the greek symbols. Unable to commit at this time, we're already behind with Berkeley v2 release by 6 months! :-(
To be sure APL is a niche (BQN even more so), and I personally am unlikely to be a customer regardless (it looks worth $75, i just don't program enough) so no pressure but it is one of the oldest programming languages and if you want to talk golden era...
Berkeley Mono is plain gorgeous. I bought it after five minutes of looking at the trial. Everything made so much sense when I saw the inspirations you listed - Eurostile, OCR-B and DIN 1451 all have a special place in my heart.
But what's more, your site in its entirety is a work of art, in form and function. So many details, from the one-click newsletter signup when logged in to the plain-English license intros. It makes me want to build a site for myself again, something I haven't done in over a decade.
To my own surprise I've even signed up for the newsletter, something I haven't done anywhere for even longer.
Thank you! Website is going to get doubly refined soon. I’d like to develop a UI framework one day, but one that never ever changes in its core design. It just gets refined over time. I must say, it’s a real pleasure to design websites. Not just frontend, but database, all the Django stuff, domain models, I love the whole thing.
The font needs work, especially Bold cut. I completely redesigned all glyphs from scratch and trying to get to release it. It's been a learning experience. Also condensed version is coming with it. All upgrades will be free to existing customers.
Btw, I agree with OP about good samples. It also bothers me a little bit when I see huge zoomed in shots of typefaces: Good for grabbing attention, but bad functionally unless it’s a display typeface specifically for billboard/headline use. So I will go to town with samples in 12 point size. We have a few but clearly not enough.
A UI framework would be a real treat, no doubt about it. And I know what you mean — I've always done full stack too, and love it. People who are serious about frontends should do their own backends, to horribly butcher Alan Kay.
As for the samples - for what its worth, what did it for me were the sections _Box drawing characters_ and _Exceptional legibility_. Just the telephone directory told me enough to download the trial.
It pains me that I will never be able to get my employer to spring for a commercial license - it would be a treat to rewrite our internal API documentation "Machine MX-4000"-style.
The trial (license valid for 7 days) is "Limited to ASCII-128 character set" but also says:
>Swapped: '/' and '\', '*' and '#'
Is that latter a common sort of thing in this scenario? I get the idea—certainly makes coding/terminal/markdown annoying—but I don't think I've seen that done elsewhere.
Intel One Mono. Not extremely different from Berkeley Mono it looks like but lower x-height, higher line height, more space around letters, and a number of smallish differences (mostly in the lower case letters and numbers and round dots instead of square). Intel has the extra visible {} and non-continuous % while Berkeley Mono has the funky @.
I really like Berkeley, JetBrains Mono, etc, but at this point I simply can't move away from Fira Code. It's, like, what code looks like to me at this point.
How about you post something new for a change, instead of asking this question repeatedly and not getting the idea that other people might have had a different experience from you.
That's just it tho. We never know why OP shared it. Did something change on the page? A new feature? Hardly anything has dates. Maybe it's just their own personal discovery of the day. (Then maybe they could just browse the previous posts if it's not news. Save us some of the repeated discussion points over and over.) You don't know if I've even seen it before. But I know from search it's not new. I know others might not have seen it. But people need to also realize things aren't new, that there might be history, that things aren't just popping into existence because they just noticed them. There's all kinds of dupes on here and sites like this that pop up here and there and it's nice to know context, if any.
You are clearly oblivious as to how off-putting your behaviour is to new contributions. Just think on that. I wish this site had a feature to ignore users.
[In 20 hours this has garnered 308 points and 122 comments and you are bleating "Anything new here?" As I said before, read the room. The world doesn't revolve around you. Perhaps you are running a bot.]
Seriously, ChrisArchitect, that’s highly off-putting. I rehash things with my friends all the time. Very often there’s nothing new about those specific things, but the context they live in has developed and we enjoy discussing them in the new context.
For instance, since the last time Berkeley Mono was the subject, Monaspace was released. Now we can talk about how Berkeley Mono relates to the current space.
I beseech thee to knock it off. This isn’t Wikipedia and we don’t need deletionists gatekeeping what’s worth discussing. It seems a lot of people are enjoying the conversation. Let them.
I like the font and was thinking about putting it on my blog, but $75 seems like a lot when there are other pretty good options. Maybe I'll test the free version and see if I love it..
Berkeley Mono is my favourite! It's the crossed seven that matches my handwritten style which I really appreciate. Not very common in other monospace fonts I've tried.
I really enjoy this font for development and writing documentation. I carry it around for everything. Default monospace across the board: Terminal, IDE, Notes; sometimes I go buck-wild and monospace the entire Desktop-Environment to match.
I also write Z and z with a stroke. And then someone on Twitter suggested we should add it as an option. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it despite of writing it that way! It’s coming.
I saw this, and the comment below asking why there are different versions of e.g. 0 and 7. Saw the variant picker on your site, and I can't help but wonder:
Do you have any plans to add the different variants in as stylistic alternates (SALTn tables)? This is how FontFont encoded two styles of numbers and other various symbols into a single OpenType font. With FF Zwo I like some of the alternates but not others and this lets me choose.
They already are part of stylistic sets. So, for example, if you download a combination of 0 and 7 (regardless of which one), there are ss01-ss06 stylistic sets that encode other options in it.
The reason why we have a "font configurator" is because lot of terminals/IDEs/tools/OS, etc haven't got a full support for OpenType features. So we let users configure it as they like and it just works.
Oh that's good to know. Admittedly I didn't look too hard but I didn't see any indication that the salt tables were populated. Judging by the comments I may not be the only one.
I guess it’s also something cultural depending on where we live. I’m from France and here a lot of people cross 7 and Z, and write 1 with a bottom bar. When I went to Japan, I found that a lot of people were disturbed by those "European" variants.
I bought it – or rather, asked for it as a gift from my wife – and it was well worth it. It brings me just a tiny bit of joy every time I see one of the beautiful ligatures in my terminal, and I was also just happy to support the creator. It takes effort to make a well-formed font, and I am thankful that there are people willing to devote time to it.
I'm a huge fan of this typeface. Initially, I was skeptic about paying, but I spent hours every single day on the screen, and after using the trial for a few days, I was sold. It's extremely good designed, the numbers are crisp, and everything is well-balanced and thought out. It's worth every single cent.
That's the logic that nudged me to buy it. I have a nice chair. I have a nice keyboard. I have a nice mouse. I have nice monitors. All of those cost more than the one-time license for something I stare at for hours a day. I've spent all that money to make my body comfortable. Why not do the same for my eyes?
A year later, I still love the way code looks on my screen. I feel like it's one of the better investments I've made.
This was the first time I bought a font, and -- surprisingly -- I haven't regretted it at all. Every time I look at my terminal there's always a little bit of happiness at how elegant the font looks.
I have bought it on sight, and never regretted a second after installing it. It's readable, easy on the eyes, and really brings the character of "the golden era of computing" to your environment. As a person who have started with computers relatively early, this font makes me feel at home.
I use it on my terminals, text editors, IDE, and browser, and it's both unobtrusive and delightful, at the same time. If you're into dark themes, pair with Gruvbox Dark. You won't regret it.
It's doesn't follow the trend, but puts its own rules on the table, and it shows.
As someone who spent a lot of time sorting, collecting, and selecting typefaces in a print shop, as soon as I saw the details in Berekeley Mono it was a similar experience. (Take my money) It's homey while having the appropriate modernity for legibility.
I prefer the version with ligatures disabled, but it's nice to see them available.
I already expect Neil will earn a purchase from me for Houston Mono when it's available. I have a terminal based "game" experience I've been toying with and waiting to use it for.
Second your Gruvbox comment, although I recently decided to take TokyoNight for a spin, I'll loop back eventually, probably!
Personally, I saw the ligatures and really didn't like them. The /= and ||= look monumentally ugly to me for C code, and makes the meaning less clear. The only ones that looked worthwhile were /* and */. The rest just seemed to be ligatures for the sake of it.
This looks like a joke: “ DO NOT OPERATE ON CRITICAL CODE WITH THE TRIAL FONT. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR DAMAGES TO YOUR MAINFRAME SYSTEM OR OTHERWISE.”
It's the nicest monospace font I've seen in a while, and I'd love to try it out, but $75 is a rather hefty price for development use. I don't mean to diminish the work that's been done, but more... I wonder if you could sell twice as much by cutting the price in half.
For a paid font $75 for an unlimited lifetime license is not at all expensive. I suspect the difficulty isn't so much getting people to pay $75 for a font, but getting people to pay for a font in the first place. The font market is essentially split between free fonts and expensive fonts. The people willing to pay for fonts are not particularly price sensitive, because if they were they would just be using a free font.
It's also that the market for "font customers" (for typesetting, design, etc.) and for developers who want a font in VSCode is very, very different.
What I'm seeing in this discussion is that the developer market is pretty price-sensitive, possibly because they're paying out of pocket and not charging back to clients or expensing.
> The people willing to pay for fonts are not particularly price sensitive, because if they were they would just be using a free font.
Fair enough, there might not be as many people ready to pay for a font as I imagine.
As for the price, it's entirely to the discretion of the maker and it's impossible to determine what the value is for the customer, so I'm not judging that.
It does price out people from lower purchasing power countries and people who are short on cash (hey that's me). But as you mentioned, it's very possible that a lot of these people would rather use a free font.
I'll save this one for when I have more disposable income :)
These typefaces that give the illusion of not being monospace are fun! And this one was a good example of those. Very easy on the eye and even with a spark of timeless retro computing. They manage get a lot into a single typeface here.
On the serif side of things there's Go mono, which I like a lot and also doesn't feel monospaced. To me it makes code look friendly, like the pages of a book.
140 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] thread[0] https://monaspace.githubnext.com/
Can highly recommend, also it is free and has several styles(x5).
https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode
Although I'm personally not a fan of ligatures, I feel they may increase mental burden at times;
for example having to look closely if it's = vs == or == vs === among other examples.
You’re right! Check out the NL (no ligature) version: https://github.com/JetBrains/JetBrainsMono/tree/master/fonts...
Conversely I can turn them on for code I didn't write.
There is no downside to ligatures.
[0]: https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro
[1]: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka
[1] https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/
[2] https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
I still bought it, because it's gorgeous, thank you for sharing it. I've emailed the font creator so hopefully they've got plans for thinner versions.
I wasn't able to find anything better yet after trying a lot of fonts: Fira, JetBrains Mono, Iosevka, Monaspace, Ubuntu Mono, and others.
Or perhaps I'm too familiar with Hack now and everything else now looks weird..
Fira Code: free monospaced font with programming ligatures
https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode
EDIT: @airstrike beat me to it. Anyway, that's my favorite.
does something about this typeface set it apart in a useful way from the zillion other free or default monospaced options? If anything it seemed a little awkward with the flourishes they added toward making it look fauxCR-able. (an artistic flourish I like as "zany graphic fun" but is it helpful for extended use?)
for the people who love it, I've no problem with enjoying flourishes, but it's calling itself serious. I'm serious and it's not taking me seriously.
On the contrary.
This sort of comment is why I have a love/hate relationship with HN. Love, because yesterday I learned some amazing stuff that I told my partner about in bed.
Hate, because of the assumptions that so many people are so quick to jump to. You know nothing about this guy’s motivations. (His name’s Neil. I’ve spoken to him. He seems like a really solid dude. He probably has thicker skin than me.)
So you come in here and you imply that this thing is essentially a scam to rob you of $75. You imply that Neil is a scammer, trying to rob you of $75.
It’s really shitty and I wish people wouldn’t do it.
Edit: I’m not saying “don’t criticise the site”. If you don’t like the site, say so. But don’t criticise the motivations about which you know literally nothing.
But the very same people will happily work for an advertising company under the guise of being a programmer and take a wage and bonus. Right on.
I can understand the skepticism against a paid font. There are some pretty grand ones available for free to anyone who'd like to use them. In this case, it was worth the premium to me to pay anyway. I don't think someone's automatically a cheapskate for thinking I'm nuts to buy a license.
Me too! But that's not what upset me. What upset me was the assumption of deceit in the parent post.
It's like drive-by shootings here sometimes; people see a thing, they don't like it, and they assume that the person creating it therefore has bad motives. I've been on the receiving end, directly, and it stinks. It makes this place worse.
I don't agree with your take on flourishes (in better terms, artistry). Every typeface has it. The process of designing a typeface is full of subjectivity and artistry.
I think most of the glyphs are straightforward, the ones that would take time are the greek symbols. Unable to commit at this time, we're already behind with Berkeley v2 release by 6 months! :-(
Berkeley Mono is plain gorgeous. I bought it after five minutes of looking at the trial. Everything made so much sense when I saw the inspirations you listed - Eurostile, OCR-B and DIN 1451 all have a special place in my heart.
But what's more, your site in its entirety is a work of art, in form and function. So many details, from the one-click newsletter signup when logged in to the plain-English license intros. It makes me want to build a site for myself again, something I haven't done in over a decade.
To my own surprise I've even signed up for the newsletter, something I haven't done anywhere for even longer.
Needlessly to say, I am a fan.
The font needs work, especially Bold cut. I completely redesigned all glyphs from scratch and trying to get to release it. It's been a learning experience. Also condensed version is coming with it. All upgrades will be free to existing customers.
Btw, I agree with OP about good samples. It also bothers me a little bit when I see huge zoomed in shots of typefaces: Good for grabbing attention, but bad functionally unless it’s a display typeface specifically for billboard/headline use. So I will go to town with samples in 12 point size. We have a few but clearly not enough.
As for the samples - for what its worth, what did it for me were the sections _Box drawing characters_ and _Exceptional legibility_. Just the telephone directory told me enough to download the trial.
It pains me that I will never be able to get my employer to spring for a commercial license - it would be a treat to rewrite our internal API documentation "Machine MX-4000"-style.
>Swapped: '/' and '\', '*' and '#'
Is that latter a common sort of thing in this scenario? I get the idea—certainly makes coding/terminal/markdown annoying—but I don't think I've seen that done elsewhere.
https://github.com/intel/intel-one-mono
Bunch of discussion last year on a Show HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30557557
The ligatures were released earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34583520
Not for you. But for others, yes.
How about you post something new for a change, instead of asking this question repeatedly and not getting the idea that other people might have had a different experience from you.
All you do is police the site, and it shows: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ChrisArchitect
You are clearly oblivious as to how off-putting your behaviour is to new contributions. Just think on that. I wish this site had a feature to ignore users.
[In 20 hours this has garnered 308 points and 122 comments and you are bleating "Anything new here?" As I said before, read the room. The world doesn't revolve around you. Perhaps you are running a bot.]
Seriously, ChrisArchitect, that’s highly off-putting. I rehash things with my friends all the time. Very often there’s nothing new about those specific things, but the context they live in has developed and we enjoy discussing them in the new context.
For instance, since the last time Berkeley Mono was the subject, Monaspace was released. Now we can talk about how Berkeley Mono relates to the current space.
I beseech thee to knock it off. This isn’t Wikipedia and we don’t need deletionists gatekeeping what’s worth discussing. It seems a lot of people are enjoying the conversation. Let them.
Support Neil, he’s a good chap. I can’t wait for Houston!
I’m sure it’s cooking and will be done when it’s done, but the teaser really makes me excited.
I really enjoy this font for development and writing documentation. I carry it around for everything. Default monospace across the board: Terminal, IDE, Notes; sometimes I go buck-wild and monospace the entire Desktop-Environment to match.
Thanks Neil for a great product.
Do you have any plans to add the different variants in as stylistic alternates (SALTn tables)? This is how FontFont encoded two styles of numbers and other various symbols into a single OpenType font. With FF Zwo I like some of the alternates but not others and this lets me choose.
The reason why we have a "font configurator" is because lot of terminals/IDEs/tools/OS, etc haven't got a full support for OpenType features. So we let users configure it as they like and it just works.
A year later, I still love the way code looks on my screen. I feel like it's one of the better investments I've made.
I use it on my terminals, text editors, IDE, and browser, and it's both unobtrusive and delightful, at the same time. If you're into dark themes, pair with Gruvbox Dark. You won't regret it.
It's doesn't follow the trend, but puts its own rules on the table, and it shows.
I can't recommend this enough.
I prefer the version with ligatures disabled, but it's nice to see them available.
I already expect Neil will earn a purchase from me for Houston Mono when it's available. I have a terminal based "game" experience I've been toying with and waiting to use it for.
Second your Gruvbox comment, although I recently decided to take TokyoNight for a spin, I'll loop back eventually, probably!
Edit: for example the space between the ‘m’ and the ‘a’ in ‘machine’ seems very big.
It doesn't try too hard and is legible, for me, at smaller sizes on macOS.
$75 prices out quite a lot of people.
What I'm seeing in this discussion is that the developer market is pretty price-sensitive, possibly because they're paying out of pocket and not charging back to clients or expensing.
Fair enough, there might not be as many people ready to pay for a font as I imagine.
As for the price, it's entirely to the discretion of the maker and it's impossible to determine what the value is for the customer, so I'm not judging that.
It does price out people from lower purchasing power countries and people who are short on cash (hey that's me). But as you mentioned, it's very possible that a lot of these people would rather use a free font.
I'll save this one for when I have more disposable income :)