Source from HN because they have shadowbans: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47773594
I’m wondering too what you are looking for in a font. Good looks, features, options to enable or disable, ligatures?
Nice to look at. Disambiguates commonly confused characters (
l,1,I;0,O).No ligatures, and no ambiguity between O and 0, l and 1 and I, etc.
No serifs too, I guess. Although I don’t think that’s very common in coding fonts.
I’m not terribly picky, mostly just want to distinguish 0 from O and l from 1.
I rather like JetBrains mono though.
Recently switched to Maple Mono because it is fun and cozy.
Connected strokes in italic style, vivify your code.
That’s cool and interesting (you can see it in action and toggle-compare on the linked website)
I wonder how distracting it would be in code, though. If it is, their configurability allows skipping that feature though, which is great.
Yea, as its only applied to italics its less distracting than it might seem at first. Your IDE may not even use italics. In VSCode with my theme, italics are used for comments and variable names, which looks like this:
I like to use this style of italics for keywords. (That’s also what the Maple examples do.) My thinking is you see keywords so often that you recognize them by shape, not by reading the individual letters. And my theory is that the italic variant being a little harder to read helps my eyes skim over keywords, to focus more on words that I do need to read precisely, like variable names.
It does mean that I spend some time customizing my syntax highlighting theme to make it work the way I prefer. I’ve got examples set up on my blog. Although that’s not Maple - it’s a different font with cursive italics called Cartograph CF.
I’ve been using JetBrains Mono and Maple looks the same but nicer. Thanks!
This is a great find. Thank you very much kind internet stranger
Yes! I built my own variant using their tool (removing the weird italic l etc). I love it.
Courier New but 0 has a distinguishing dot.
No ligatures.
For me, distinguish similar letters such as 0, O, I, l, 1. Then I want ligature because I like them, then emojis should align vertically to the grid, high resolution for small font sizes, size difference between tall and not-tall characters, and it shouldn’t have narrow characters.
Last time when I was changing up the font I went to https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads and tried out a couple until I found one that I liked. I’m really picky about the symbol shapes, I most often just bail on a font because the @, % or & is ugly I might also bail if ` vs ’ is not distinct enough.
Some fonts have absolutely wild italics that are almost cursive which is a hard pass. Even though I only see it once every week maybe I’m just not up for it.
No ambiguous characters, nice ligatures
I want it to be Iosevka
I love Input sans because it gives me a very pleasant retro vibe, especially at heavy weights.
This came up the other week, https://www.codingfont.com/ can help you narrow down what you find looks the best.
Ligatures, slashed zeros, clearly distinguishable Il1/O0, not too big of a gap between lines, and maybe script-like italics. My current main monospace font is IosevkaTerm Nerd Font.
I also find the idea of using retro pixel fonts interesting, but so far couldn’t get myself to actually try some of the fonts mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708411 .
Good readability of code.
Perfectly half circle parens
I would like my parentheses to look normal, thank you.
I use Fira Code for coding, mostly because of the ligatures. For console I use Inconsolata because it’s compact and good for long console lines.
I admit that https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode has the best presentation.
Vibes, gotta feel comfy. That’s why it’s 0xProto nerd font mono for me
