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?
I am picky and get bored all the time. These fonts below have had my attention for significant period of time.
- Used Hack for sometime and got bored of the weird diamond on the zero. Hence, downloaded HackSlash, A patched variant with slashed zero.
- Fira Code
- Source Code Pro
- Customized version of Iosevka mixed with monaco.
- Input mono but I changed the variants to get curved i, l, J
- Ubuntu mono
- Maple Mono (Latest I am trying)
- Menlo
- Consolas
- PT Mono
- Red Hat Mono
- CodeNewRoman Nerd Font
Someone mentioned codingfont.com… but I spoil it for myself by immediately recognizing the fonts I already got weary of and get varying results just like if I let my picky self choose.
Edit: Probably forgot to mention that I have tried the Nerd font variants and exclusively the NF variants of above fonts like CodeNewRoman NF, BlexMono, CommitMono NF
Not much, disambiguous characters mostly. I’ve been using M Plus for years because I sometimes need CJK glyphs. Inconsolata, Fira Code, etc. look OK to me. Still haven’t found the perfect typeface to fill my developer-typographic font void.
Nice to look at. Disambiguates commonly confused characters (
l,1,I;0,O).I’m not terribly picky, mostly just want to distinguish 0 from O and l from 1.
I rather like JetBrains mono though.
And l from I from | from 1. Stuff like that. And be pretty. And somewhat retro futuristic, without sacrificing readability.
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 love Input sans because it gives me a very pleasant retro vibe, especially at heavy weights.
No ambiguous characters, nice ligatures
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:
Why is ‘l’ the only cursive letter (and not connected to anything)? It’s kind of jarring
I don’t like that one and the same character looks different on the same line (here
console.log).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.
Oh wow that looks pretty and also makes total sense in theory. I think I have seen it in other places as well and might just steal that. :) Thank you for pointing that out.
This is a great find. Thank you very much kind internet stranger
I’ve been using JetBrains Mono and Maple looks the same but nicer. Thanks!
Yes! I built my own variant using their tool (removing the weird italic l etc). I love it.
This came up the other week, https://www.codingfont.com/ can help you narrow down what you find looks the best.
I want it to be Iosevka
Thank you for reminding me of this font name. I did a clean install of my OS a few weeks back, and forgot the terminal font I had been using
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.
For mono space I’ve been using Ubuntu mono for a long time, there may be better but it was good enough when I was choosing and I haven’t had any issues that made me want to pick a new one. For standard I use open sans.
I really like the Ubuntu font family. Been rocking it on my Bazzite install for a bit now
Courier New but 0 has a distinguishing dot.
No ligatures.
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.
