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Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives (monolisa.dev)

190 points by bebraw ↗ HN
Originally we (Andrey, Marcus, Juho) built MonoLisa in 2020 as we realised there's room for a better monospaced typeface for developers. The key insight was to make the glyphs slightly wider to make more room for design to make letters like m feel less cramped.

Since then we've released a variable v2 (2022) and now we're happy to expand the typeface with a new family called MonoLisa Text. The reasoning was to cover *other* use cases beyond coding with this proportional font.

We hope you give Monolisa a go as there's a free trial to try. We also welcome feedback!

50 comments

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veidr
I love this font. I think it is probably the only coding font I have ever actually purchased.
gregrobson
Bought MonoLisa back in 2022, never even considered switching coding typeface since. Before that time I used to switch every 3-6 months.

It's really well balanced easy on the eye.

melody_calling
I adore MonoLisa, thank you for all the effort that's gone into making it and congratulations on the new release!
roundcan7998
Created an account, to come tell you folk, just how much I love Monolisa. Have been using it every since they launched, in both my terminal, and my code editors.

It’s lovely!

editing to add: They even have PPP pricing! Which as someone living in India, I highly appreciate, since it puts a lovely piece of art within reach.

nitinreddy88
20k (30$) for font for someone living in India is too much to ask.
littlecranky67
I'm in spain using DIGI (a romanian telco) - their geolocation puts me into romania and offer a 40% discount.

Anyway, still not going to pay 75€+ for a font.

cyphar
I'm more of a bitmap font guy (at least, as long as my eyes continue to forgive me for it) but I'm always interested to see what other fonts there are around. It does look quite nice.

I must admit when I ran across the second real paragraph from the main page, I couldn't help but only think more and more about how we will look back on marketing copy like this in a decade from now:

AI assistants produce both code and prose. MonoLisa Text renders long-form explanations with optimal readability, while MonoLisa Code keeps your code crystal clear. The perfect pairing for the AI era. (Under the title "A perfect pairing for the AI era.")

Ignoring the deep pit of sadness I felt when thinking about the incredibly long (and revolutionary) history of typefaces that led us to today for just a moment, I'm honestly curious how effective this marketing is. How many people would assume a font would be suitable for general text but not LLM-generated text and would need to be dissuaded from that notion? I wonder if someone has started selling keyboards that are "perfect for prompting" (but I'm too scared to look at this stage).

applfanboysbgon
> I wonder if someone has started selling keyboards that are "perfect for prompting"

I don't know about such marketing copy, but keyboards with a "CoPilot key" are now standard, particularly on all Windows laptops, which is an even more egregious form of marketing.

kristianp
I've taken recently to running bitmap Terminus (not the ttf) in my terminals. I find the lack of blurred edges to be extremely refreshing. My laptop has a pixel density of about 162 ppi, so normal fonts, especially in chrome on linux don't make me happy.

Do you recommend any specific bitmap coding fonts?

Amekedl
Looks good. Won't ever buy a font though.
warpspin
Seems there's no way to disable the <= ligature without disabling whitespace ligatures? I'm not all too crazy for real ligatures but whitespace adjustments otherwise seem nice.

Also, as it's so finely adjustable, would love if they'd offer some variants for dot and comma, to increase their size, because that's my number one problem with fonts since age 45.

smcleod
Looks decent but $250 AUD for a font? Even for local and personal use? That's... a lot. I was thinking if it is paid and it was around $25 I'd consider it, then I saw the price!
hootz
Yeah, I've read the entire website, but I still don't understand how a font for programming can be worth that much.
microflash
Looks interesting.

> The Licensee may not modify, translate, adapt, alter, decompile, disassemble, decrypt, reverse engineer, change or alter the embedding bits, the font name, legal notices contained in the font software, nor seek to discover the source code of the font data, convert into another font format, create bitmaps, add or subtract any glyphs, symbols or accents, or any other derivative works based on the electronic data in this product.

This is why I haven’t bought it. I like to subset fonts to reduce the size. Any font license that prohibits this just gets ignored by me, no matter how good it is.

bebraw
I asked around about this particular term. It seems it's strict like that because looser wording would allow resales in certain parts of the world.

That said, I see no problem in subsetting or customizing the font especially in personal context. The website even provides tooling for this purpose so it's definitely within the license since you are literally creating your own custom version on the fly.

I hope this clarifies why it seems to be a standard clause for fonts.

mistercow
IANAL, but isn't most of that unenforceable in the US? Typefaces have their own weird place in IP law which is different from copyright.
abcd_f
Yeah, sounds like you can't even screenshot it.
pmontra
> MonoLisa ships as a variable font with two axes. Weight gives you every cut from Thin to Black in a single file — no megabytes per style. Grade fine-tunes typographic color by adjusting stroke thickness without changing glyph widths

If any web page designer reads this, weight 1 and grade -50 is what many web pages look like, or even thinner than that. Weight 300 and grade 0 are the lower boundary of readability IMO.

A free (as money) font with most of those properties is Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, both monospace and variable width. https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/

groos
I call all these new fonts monofonts, mono in the sense of monoculture. Aesthetics practically indistinguishable from each other. Give me one of the IBM Selectric fonts in a modern form and I'll be happy as a clam.
rirze
Look nice but super expensive for the normal developer. Good luck with the monetization, hope you get some company customers.
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microtonal
I have used MonoLisa for a few years now as my terminal and editor font and I absolutely love it. It was a fair bit cheaper when I bought it (80 Euro IIRC), but was well-worth it!
layer8
Regarding coding, the characters “:={” are all vertically centered differently.
efficax
$149 for a font for personal computer use is kind of steep! I would pay $20 for this, but the value has to be pretty high to pay $149 when there's a huge selection of free fonts on nerdfonts.com, of which many are pretty great. Like what does this font really offer that makes it so pricey?
oneseven
I can't figure this out from the website, does the text variant have tabular figures?
dvt
In a world where Fira Code, Hack, JetBrains Mono, and like a zillion others (of equal, if not greater, quality) are offered for free, this is obviously a pure marketing play and it's sad we live in a world where even fucking fonts are so heavily monetized.
jvican
Similar to Input Mono font, which is superior to Monolisa in pretty much any way I can think of, plus free. https://input.djr.com/
alberth
Title: "a typeface for developers"

> and now we're happy to expand the typeface with a new family called MonoLisa Text. The reasoning was to cover other use cases beyond coding with this proportional font.

Dumb question, when should a developer not use a monospaced font? I.e. when should they use MonaLisa Text

I'm sure I'm missing the obvious, but it is purely for LLM output use cases as the website implies (in which case why isn't Claude approach of using a serif font a better strategy).

Please don't take my comments are negative. Just genuinely curious, which is why I'm asking.

PufPufPuf
Umm... Who would pay $149 to use a font? Maybe I'm not enough of a typography nerd, but I find the free choices (JetBrains Mono, Iosevka, Fira Code, ...) quite enough.
s2banks
The free choices are fine, but I've just upgraded to v3 for both Code + Text because I genuinely like how MonoLisa is built compared with the others you've listed. I like the width, I like the descenders, I like the terminals, I like the ligatures (I don't have to go looking for some NF font variant) -- I guess I'm a typogrpahy nerd? (Probably, as I can see Bringhurst and Stocks to my left.)

I don't know if you've looked at the cost of other fonts, but $149 is very much on the "cheaper" end. And it's worth it to me to have a font I like looking at, as I'll be looking at it all day every day. Better yet if you're someone who enjoys the ones you listed. It just so happens that out of the list of 4, MonoLisa appeals to me the most.