Unfortunately not available to compare on <a href="https://www.programmingfonts.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.programmingfonts.org/</a><p>While I'm here: Victor Mono has been my programming font of choice for a while now: <a href="https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/" rel="nofollow">https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/</a><p>Oh, look at that, the Victor Mono homepage has a font comparison slider that allows you to compare it to MonoLisa! MonoLisa advertises that it's wider than other monospace fonts, and you can really see that in the comparison. One of the things I appreciate about Victor Mono is that it is <i>narrower</i> than many other monospace fonts (while still being very readable), allowing you to fit more code side-by-side.
Please stop it with the "coding ligatures" already. They are not helpful and only serve to obscure the code being written.<p>This has got to be one of my least favourite trends in programming aesthetics these days. For a font claiming to "follow function" to devote so much effort to sacrificing function for the _vogue du jour_ is especially rich.
I am the only one who finds fonts a bit expensive for personal use? It is not a rant, I am not saying it isn't worth it, that font designers can't make money, etc... But that puts it on the same level as tools like Sublime Text or Beyond Compare. For me, it is enough of a turn off not to use a commercial font, especially considering that the free offering is quite good.<p>I totally understand the higher price for commercial use, here, it is cheap compared to the costs of hiring a designer, and it may have a real impact on your sales and ultimately earn you money.<p>But why is the price for personal use around $60? Is it some kind of a sweet spot because most people won't buy fonts anyways, even for $1, but those who do expect to pay that kind of money. Does it account for piracy, which I guess is easy and goes unnoticed if you only use it personally?
If you're willing to spend money on a font for coding, then do yourself a favor and take a look at PragmataPro as well. I bought a license (checks notes...) 8 years ago and it has served me very well.<p>If I was <i>not</i> down to pay for a font, then I'd probably use one of Iosevka's forms. Personally, however, it became clear to me that just like my monitor, the font I spend hours looking at every day is also worth some money.<p><a href="https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/" rel="nofollow">https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/</a>
I'm going to hop on my hobby horse again for a second:<p>One of their first points is this:<p>>Designing a monospace font is much harder than a traditional, proportional one: being constrained by the same width of all glyphs can result in a boring or unreadable font.<p>And they're absolutely right. But it begs the first-principals question-- why code using a monospace font? Today, every major editor that isn't terminal-based supports proportional width fonts beautifully. It's also incredibly rare to see modern style guides that depend on having consistent column widths. In 2022, there's no technical reason to code using monospaced fonts. And there are a ton of beautiful and readable fonts out there -- There are probably a dozen pre-installed on your system that are more beautiful and readable than this font.<p>You see this tag line time-and-time again. "A font designed by and for software developers." But font design is and art and a discipline. Doing it well is very hard.
Since we are talking about our favourite coding fonts, my personal choice is on Comic Code. I find it very easy to read and better than the other mono comic sans fonts.<p><a href="https://tosche.net/fonts/comic-code" rel="nofollow">https://tosche.net/fonts/comic-code</a>
I find that font very beautiful and pleasant to look at.<p>That said, the licensing seems completely out of touch from reality to me. Today we are living in the cloud area, where data and and workspace are replicated across devices. When I read that you need multiple licences to have it on more than 2 personal devices, that sounds too much of a hassle to consider buying it.
On the topic of fonts: If your font of choice has it, try using the medium weight as the "normal" weight in your editor — I've found I prefer it to the regular weight with most fonts. I started doing this after noticing that the default Xcode font is SF Mono <i>Medium</i>.
Do people really care that much about editor fonts? I just use SF Mono and call it a day. I've never had a problem where the font, of all things, was the main cause of something not working for me.
I looked at it a few years ago and dismissed it because it’s so similar to Source Code Pro in terms of spacing, size and overall feel. Source Code Pro is an excellent wide font that I’ve been using since its release about a decade ago. And it’s free, and there are Nerd Font variants with ligatures if you’re into that.<p>I noticed that MonaLisa added script variant last year, so if you want something like that in your editor it’s a very good choice. In fact, I’d recommend it over Operator Mono (the OG monospaced font with scripted italics), because the later has a much smaller character set.<p>Or, pick a free Victor Mono if you like narrower symbols. Alas, us - wide font users - have to pay for a script italics :)
> being constrained by the same width of all glyphs can result in a boring or unreadable font.<p>I don't see how "boring" is an issue here. If the whole thing has a goal of functionality, why do I care if it's boring? And what is a "boring" font anyway?<p>Reminds me of the Apple-induced desire to call everything "stunning" or "beautiful."
> As software developers, we always strive for better tools but rarely consider font as such.<p>Meanwhile, I look at new coding fonts on at least a monthly basis. Nothing beats Input Mono [^1] for me; I actually like wider fonts, so I might take this one out for a spin.<p>[^1]: <a href="https://input.djr.com/" rel="nofollow">https://input.djr.com/</a>
Not a fan of these sharp modern faces in general. However, the small text in this one looks particularly "smudgy".<p>I stopped hopping monospace fonts when I discovered Go Mono. Go Mono does not seem to get blurry even at small sizes. M, m, n always look impeccable. Not so here.<p>I'm not sure. Maybe something is wrong with the text-rendering in my browser.
Since these comments just seem to be suggesting alternatives or chiding this font for its price tag, I'll jump in and say that I bought it about a year ago and absolutely love it. There was definitely some sticker-shock at the price at first.<p>After staring at MonoLisa in editors for 8+ hours a day for over a year, I can say that I _really_ love this font. Installing it is the first thing I do when setting up a new environment. It reads well in code and in the terminal, and I even wrote a significant amount of prose (60k+ words) in it and it was a pleasure. Definitely do not regret spending the money.
I thought this was gonna be yet another monospace font I wouldn't be able to tell from all the others, but fuck me as soon as the page loaded this one just spoke to me. Grabbing this for sure, well done!
There is a font on my KDE desktop called just "Monospace" and its a great font.<p>I can't find a font file called Monospace. Does anybody know what the font is? I would love to have it on my windows machine.
The site lists increased width of the font as a feature - but after discovering PragmataPro and Iosevka (that is usually mentioned as an open source alternative) I fell in love with how much horizontal space can be saved with those fonts. I often find myself opening two shells/IDEs side by side, and at these moments I truly appreciate how little space they occupy. From my perspective, it's a no for MonoLisa.
I'm a big fan of Input Sans as well: <a href="https://djr.com/input/" rel="nofollow">https://djr.com/input/</a>
> Designing a monospace font is much harder than a traditional, proportional one: being constrained by the same width of all glyphs can result in a boring or unreadable font.<p>A very ironic statement because I find the font to be absolutely unreadable.
This may seem like a minor nitpick but it's something that popped out at me: italisizing a font shouldn't add or remove serifs. There is a reason why Unicode defines both sans- and serif versions of italics.
Perhaps I'm missing why this is desired for fonts in general, but my tendency when selecting one for editing code is to use one with a smaller vertical line spacing to minimise spacing between lines (and therefore fit more lines on screen).
Why do people appear to prefer the opposite (massive distance between lines)? I'm currently using Input Mono, not because I like it specifically as a font, but because it's relatively narrow, and because its vertical spacing is smaller than many others.
I am one of those using this font for ~1 year now, very happy with it. As a designer/developer with penchant for typography I am the perfect target customer I guess.
My favorite font still remains fantasque sans mono. It's loosely based on comic sans, I just need a little playful edge in my coding job. Otherwise it gets too stale.<p>Love the font
Another day, another Letter Gothic lookalike "developer font". I do not feel particularly motivated to switch away from the terminal bitmap fonts I normally use. There's something about an 8x8, 8x16, or similar small numbers grid of pixels -- the constraints seemed to breed creativity that you don't see too much of anymore in monospaced fonts for coding/terminal use.
- While the effort to create fonts is not trivial and should be rewarded, this seems expensive. I've bought fonts before, but they were like $5-15, not $100.
- It's fantastic to see the variety of human experience on display in the wide variety of font preferences. I used to thing "why to we need more than one?" LOL
- My favorite so far is Source Code Pro.
The roman (not italic or script, though) “g” is horrible and doesn't fit with the other letters that would normally sit their main body on the baseline but also have a descender. Why is its upper portion raised and squashed, and it's tail so misshapen?<p>I cannot look at text in this font without the feeling that every “g” is reaching out from the screen and slapping me in the eye.
> MonoLisa uses open forms and terminals (starting and ending points) that are pointing towards the neighboring letters to let the eye follow the line of text fluently.<p>Does the lowercase g follow that convention? It seems to make me almost stumble while reading and do a double take on what the letter is. But maybe it's just because I'm new to the font.
Looks good. I'd like fonts meant for technical use to include the following 3 unicode symbols:<p>21A7-depth<p>2334-counterbore<p>2335-countersink.<p>These are standard for hole annotations on CAD drawings.
I don't understand how they can advertise this font being "wider" than other ones. I skipped all those modern Programming Fonts because none of them is as condensed and readable as "TheSans Mono Condensed".<p>That font is terrible because its basically still ASCII only, but I use it everywhere. I would pay good money for a Unicode version.
Is this part about terminals actually true? Or a tad exaggerated for marketing?<p>> <i>MonoLisa uses open forms and terminals (starting and ending points) that are pointing towards the neighboring letters to let the eye follow the line of text fluently.</i><p>Regardless, I like the font overall. My go-to is Fira Code but this might be worth a try.
> As software developers, we always strive for better tools but rarely consider font as such.<p>A quick search of hn shows the opposite: it seems like we're always talking about fonts and releasing fonts and comparing fonts. I practically have monospace font fatigue. But yeah this font looks nice enough
Beauty! My personal preference is iA Writer Mono.
<a href="https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts/tree/master/iA%20Writer%20Mono" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts/tree/master/iA%20Writer%20...</a>
I don't know what they were doing with their javascript, but they broke both the reload button & ctrl-R as well as maxing a CPU for 30s after closing the tab. Possibly something with the canvas, I got a fingerprinting attempt warning for that.
I like Comic Mono. It feels informal, playful, produces no fatigue, and keeps me from taking my code too seriously.<p><a href="https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/" rel="nofollow">https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/</a>
I like how it makes some aesthetic changes while also maintaining that "programmer" font. That's super cute.<p>Though honestly, I'm mainly focused on the name. That's such a fantastic and clever name for a font and I can't get over it.
If I was going to pay for it, I wish they'd offer nerdfont patched versions of their font (see <a href="https://www.nerdfonts.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nerdfonts.com/</a>).
The first font with a pre-existing theme song: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMH96B8QWcc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMH96B8QWcc</a>
Awe, the script version doesn't have ligatures. Some people think I'm a weirdo but I really like having my keywords in ligatured script and the rest of the code normal.
I can't really move away from:<p>- Dejavu Sans Mono on the editor<p>- Ubuntu Mono on the terminal<p>Maybe it's just that Ubuntu renders such fonts beautifully, but any other font (except maybe Roboto) is an eyesore, to me
After switching a lot of programming fonts and using Fira Code for a long time, I've now ended up using whatever the default font is that comes preset on VS Code
The way "Cc" is drawn makes it harder to read for me for some reason. Almost as if the letter is about to fuse with the next one.<p>>CG<p>>Different terminals of capitals<p>Doesn't really work well for me.
It's really pleasant on the eyes, even in running text.<p>I'm using Fira Code and it's only good for code. When I use it in the CLI everything looks off.<p>MonoLisa could solve this!
What I like most about this font is that it has a completely different aesthetic from my favorite monospace, JetBrains mono. It has more of the humanist flavor of a Frutiger versus the DIN-like rationalism most monospace fonts adopt.
I wonder how many people glancing at the landing page have browsed over to the download page, and discovered that this a paid font? To the tune of $69 to $239, depending on the options you want.<p>If this were something really revolutionary, then okay. But this looks like every other Bitstream Vera Sans Mono variant, just tweaked to be a touch wider than Fira Code or Jetbrains Mono. But half of the fonts on <a href="https://www.programmingfonts.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.programmingfonts.org</a> are Bitstream Vera Sans Mono variants, a touch wider than Fira Code or Jetbrains Mono. And they're all open source and free.