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Mononoki – A Font for Programming and Code Review
- nathancahill 11y agoMy favorite font for Sublime.
- UncleSam 11y agoYou are referring to the color scheme, not the font. The default font for your Sublime Text is probably either Monospace, Consolas, or Menlo Regular. Yes, this will confuse a lot of people who enjoy the default color scheme of Sublime. This is something completely different.
- bcpermafrost 11y agoI dont think he said anything about default.
- izym 11y agoAre you sure? There's quite far from Monokai to Mononoki.
- jolux 11y agoHow do you know?
- nathancahill 11y agoI use the Dawn x Github color scheme[0] and the Mononoki font. [0] https://github.com/AlexanderEkdahl/github-sublime-theme https://github.com/AlexanderEkdahl/github-sublime-theme
- UncleSam 10y agoI apologize - I did not notice the slight variance in spelling and made a hasty assumption.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoThis is quite nice, and I really appreciate the proper differentiation of similar characters. It still gets a bit blurry at low point sizes, though. If you're after a font that is pixel-crisp at small sizes (and don't mind if it doesn't size up all that well), check out Proggy bitmap fonts: http://upperbounds.net/ http://upperbounds.net/
- kbenson 11y agoMonospace - This is an universal requirement for source code typography. It's not just an historic artifact from the olden days of terminals, but an useful convention to allow two dimensional structuring and highlighting differences on the character level. Well, since there are people that swear by using variable space fonts for programming, it's not necessarily a universal requirement. I agree it is a very useful convention though, and prefer monospace fonts for terminals and programming myself.
- jowiar 11y agoI'm waiting for the editor with a layout engine that doesn't assume monospace -- the tooling is a bigger problem than anything else for variable-width fonts.
- dri_ft 11y agoI haven't used it much, but I recently learnt that emacs allows it. There's a minor mode called ‘variable-pitch-mode’.
- terhechte 11y agoEmacs can do it just fine: mx variable-pitch-mode https://www.dropbox.com/s/f7u7iagunxl4p25/emacs-var-pitch.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/f7u7iagunxl4p25/emacs-var-pitch.pn...
- geofft 11y agoYou might like the "elastic tabstops" idea: http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/ http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/ Although the editor support for the concept doesn't look great.
- tobr 11y agoMostly works in Sublime, which I've been using with Input Sans for a bit over a year. The only thing that breaks is indentation guides, which end up in the wrong place. I would not want to go back to a monospaced font.
- kbenson 11y ago
- akamaka 11y agoDoes anyone else find most programming fonts to be overly heavyweight? I end up sticking with Courier New because of its light, thin lines, even though it's not a perfect font. Are there any other monospace fonts with light weights?
- saidajigumi 11y agoI've been rather fond of Adobe's Source Code Pro[1][2]. Notably, it comes in weights all the way down to ExtraLight. My typical setup these days uses ExtraLight in iTerm2 on retina displays. Depending on the display (and sometimes the font renderer), I'll play with combinations of weight and size to find the best fit for a given installation. [1] http://adobe-fonts.github.io/source-code-pro/ http://adobe-fonts.github.io/source-code-pro/ [2] https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro
- Delameko 11y agoSource Code Pro and Input Mono both have light and extra light weights. https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro http://input.fontbureau.com/ http://input.fontbureau.com/
- num 11y ago+1 for Input font from Font Bureau but with anti-aliasing enabled. I've been happy with Monaco without anti-aliasing enabled.
- pixeloution 11y agoI'm a big fan of TheSansMono - but its not exactly cheap (I think it was about $120 for the "office" group which I bought). The characters are pleasing, easy to read, and really I just find them nice. http://www.lucasfonts.com/fonts/thesansmono/thesansmono-office/overview/ http://www.lucasfonts.com/fonts/thesansmono/thesansmono-offi...
- jakub_g 11y ago(going offtopic) Seems everyone has a different taste. I prefer medium-weight fonts, Courier is way too light for me. Do you work on a Mac BTW? I think there might be some massive rendering difference between Macs and other OSes. You can tell by reading people's blogs. Some authors use super narrow, gray-on-white font, which is generally unreadable on Windows, but I think it may look just fine on macbooks. Personally, depending on editor (each editor has slightly different rendering, spacing, interline etc.), I'm using DejaVu Sans Mono or Lucida Console. I dislike Consolas, because it's too blurry for me; so much that I generally immediately delete it from my OS installation, in order for it to not show up when I'm reading coding blogs.
- valbaca 11y agoThis looks awful on a Mac at size <= 12, super fuzzy compared to Menlo
- krafts 11y agoMonaco
- krafts 11y agoMonaco
- PaulHoule 11y agoMy eyes are burning. Gimmie the old 3270 terminal typeface anyday!
- engi_nerd 11y agohttps://github.com/rbanffy/3270font https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font In case you didn't already know that this exists.
- Paul_S 11y agoA sample would be nice. Look at this one that another commenter here linked to: https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig. Samples! You immediately know what it's about. I don't think a ttf font can't compete with a handmade raster one like Terminus. Maybe on high dpi displays?
- maxaf 11y agoOne day I'll come across a monospace font that will look & feel as good as the Bloomberg Terminal font.
- elcapitan 11y agoInteresting - had to look that up. Here's a Quora post about it: https://www.quora.com/What-font-is-used-in-Bloomberg-Terminal https://www.quora.com/What-font-is-used-in-Bloomberg-Termina... . It's designed by Matthew Carter, the designer of Georgia and Verdana, he's an expert on screen-readable fonts. The interesting thing is that one part of the optimization for finance was all those special fraction glyphs. I have never seen such weird fractions in actual use, I would have thought people use normal decimal numbers everywhere.
- maxaf 11y agoWhen I worked at Bloomberg, the origins of that font weren't a mystery. I used it on my company-issued Mac and loved it. Whatever they paid for it, the price was definitely worth it. I don't suppose I'll ever find a suitable replacement, which also means that I jump at every opportunity to try out a new monospace font. I currently have 7 in my .Xdefaults, and these are just the ones I kinda-sorta liked and hadn't deleted.
- soperj 11y agoWhy don't you just continue to use the terminal font then? That Quora link ^ made it looked like you could get a copy.
- anotheryou 11y agoI like this source code pro fork with ligatures (at times more irritating than useful, but sexy): https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig edit: switched to Fira Code Light (now that there is a light version) https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode
- planckscnst 11y agoPretty nice. Since the line in the 0 is so shallow, it looks a lot like the θ. I prefer dotted 0 because it's a character that frequently repeated as in "100000" and the slants all together there makes it feel skewed and uncomfortable.
- mfb2 11y agoPowerline support? Kind of a dealbreaker.
- michaelmior 11y agoI agree, but you can patch the font yourself https://github.com/powerline/fontpatcher https://github.com/powerline/fontpatcher
- Zardoz84 10y agoI just checked that PowerLine/AirLine support is missing.
- s9w 11y agoI've added it to the programming font comparison at http://s9w.io/font_compare/ http://s9w.io/font_compare/
- jonhohle 11y agoI'm really surprised that in all of those fonts, Monaco, Monte Carlo, and ProFont Windows are the only ones with single story lowercase "a".
- epidemian 10y agoSome of them use a single story "a" for the italicized form. Consolas, Courier Prime, Envy Code R, Fantasque Sans Mono, Iosevka, Luculent and mononoki, and mabe others that i missed. You can check them out on the "Compare" mode on that page, "var" is rendered in italics :)
- madmalik 10y agoI can only speak for my design process, but i had chosen a double story a for mononoki because a single story a can be really hard to distinguish from an o, especially in a more geometric typeface. Monaco gets away with it because it has very pronounced bowls, but even there it's easy to mistake one for the other.
- clishem 10y agoYou might want tot consider adding Monaco too.
- maxaf 11y agoThank you for this page! It's such a ridiculous time sink though. But thank you anyway.
- s9w 11y agoThanks! Time sink for wasting time on finding the perfect font? I think it's worthwhile. Programmers spend so much time looking at their font
- satysin 11y agoPretty font but looks like shit in Visual Studio 2015. I blame VS though as it only seems to render Consolas well which has pissed me off a lot since the switch to their WPF-based editor in VS2010. Sigh.
- comex 11y agoNot that it matters, but I wonder where the name came from. It sounds Japanese (although the first part is obviously inspired by 'monospace'), but 'mononoki' isn't a Japanese word. There are many ways it could be interpreted as a combination of two words, though, or it could be a corruption of 'mononoke' (a spirit).
- clay_to_n 11y agoMaybe a plan on both "Mononoke" and "Monokai" (the other font)?
- clay_to_n 10y ago(Should be pun)
- bydo 11y agoIt could be three words: mono no ki. Mono (as 物) is generally "thing," which doesn't really work, but we can assume it's being used as simply mono (in loan form, モノ), short for "monospace," here. No (の) is a particle indicating possession, and "ki" (as 気) is "spirit" or "essence" (with different kanji it could be quite a few other things; Japanese has a lot of homophones). So I suppose we could translate the name to "the essence of monospace," if we were so inclined, and transliterate it back to Japanese as モノの気.
- madmalik 10y agoCreator here. It just sounded nice and there is no deeper meaning. But your interpretation is great and might as well adopt it :D
- boondaburrah 11y agoCool, but what I really need to know is if two characters next to each other make a square, such that I can have CJK characters in the same line and not muck up the formatting.
- kazinator 11y agoI just got this to work in Windows with gvim. While the mononoki font doesn't have any Kanji in it, in Vim you can separately configure a font for the "wide" characters. I have: :set guifont=mononoki:h11:cANSI :set guifontwide=MS_Mincho:h11:cANSI With this, East Asian characters show up fine. They don't look good next to the mononoki but the spacing is good. MS_Gothic looks a bit better, since it has the simplified, blocky kanji strokes. Basically this mixture of two fonts, one for one-space-characters and another for the Unicode two-spacers, is up to your editor to get right. I tried increasing the size of the guifontwide. No matter what size I pick, the alignment is correct; for excessively large sizes of the wide font relative to the regular one, the kanji just start to get jammed together. Basically you have to increase their sizes together to avoid the cramping.
- hackuser 11y agoFrom someting I prepared long ago, easily confused glyphs, depending on the typeface (if you aren't sure what one of the characters is ... perhaps try a different typeface?): * b69B80Oo * 1Il| * ij * 5S * 9gq * co * rn m * cl d * vv w * ., * :; * `' * ''" * ' and (curved/smart/curly single quotes) * " and (curved/smart/curly double quotes) * ~- * )]} * u and (mu) * v and (nu) * Capital vs. lowercase letters. wW xX zZ vV uU cC sS Note that many of the above are easier to distinguish because they are next to each other and you are conciously examining them. You need to read your code and know a character is a colon and not a semicolon without even thinking about it.
- unexistance 10y agoha thanks :D used to decide on fonts based on 0Oo 1Il| only
- Kinnard 11y agoThis looks cool. But how does it help with formatting and code review?
- jtnegrotto 11y agoCongrats to the creator, at a glance this looks nice and readable. If I ever tire of Iosevka I'll give it a try (that's a big if though; Iosevka has the advantage of being both beautiful and narrow, so I can keep multiple panes open comfortably).
- mmgutz 11y agoNice looking font with flare to it :) Maybe I've been using Source Code Pro and Consolas for too long. A few things caught my eye: - '(' and ')' do not align vertically - '(' looks odd next to '0' - 'e' and 'c' look too similar at smaller pt
- mikelward 11y agoBonus points for the fizzbuzz reference on the homepage. You now have my attention.
- microcolonel 11y agoThis typeface is excellent, and it might replace Envy Code R for me. I've liked working with Envy, but it is nonfree and I don't have permission to distribute it with new glyphs. This is a bummer since I wanted more complete Hellenic and a full set of Cyrillic characters including Ukrainian extras, and was willing to draw the glyphs. This complete turnoff may be one of the main reasons I switch to Mononoki. Mononoki also looks far better on higher resolution displays, something I'm investing in right now.
- Pulce 11y agohttp://www.fontspace.com/philing/braille-normal http://www.fontspace.com/philing/braille-normal
- dfc 11y agoIt looks like Ubuntu Mono with some tweaks. Is there an easy way to compare font X vs font Y?
- dfbrown 11y agoI'm not a fan of 0 (zero) having rounded sides and O having straight sides, I think it should be the other way around.
- GreaterFool 10y agoYou'll have to pry Terminus out of my cold dead hands! Seriously though, I appreciate people making fonts! Variety is great and sometimes just changing fonts for a while is refreshing.
- alexdowad 10y agoCool, I like it! Thanks, Matthew!
- optforfon 10y agoI feel like this is a bit heretical, but I feel like fonts in practice are something that you just kinda get used to after a day of use. The only time you're really aware of them is when you look at two fonts side by side. So the trick for me has been to use the same font everywhere in my system. For me that's been Noto/Noto-Mono. They're trying to eventually cover all of Unicode and I personally (after a bit of adjustment) really like the long and skinny. It also has really nice Asian characters natively so it doesn't ever look goofy
- sajithdilshan 10y agoIt looks so similar to Monaco [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monaco_(typeface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monaco_(typeface)]
- perlpimp 10y agoon mac non-antialised version looks to be the case with mild jaggies. not that pleasant. if there is a solution i'd like to hear it, font otherwise looks good.
- ultramancool 10y agoIt's pretty nice but almost looks stringy to me. I'm extremely used to Dejavu Sans Mono for both terminal and code usage. Every time I try to switch to something else I wind up going back.
- kazinator 10y agoThe @ character in this font looks odd; the center loop is filled in, so it looks like something from Thai script. But no other glyph (in the ASCII range of the font) has this feature, so it is glaringly inconsistent. I used this for a day, then ditched it. Back to a Courier derivative for me. There is a reason we have fonts with serifs: they provide visual clues to the eyes. Sans-serif is slick, but less readable. We might compare this to taking the high frequencies out of audio. The sound is "smooth", but lacks clarity. Mononoki looks great in screen-shots; I might consider it again when I'm having some golden piece of source code printed 40 inches wide and framed for hanging on a wall. So long as that code doesn't contain @ symbols.
- kazinator 10y agoI spent a bunch of time searching for good monospaced fonts as a result of this submission. Luxi Mono stood out as very decent. I settled on a font called Consolas. I use it not only in Vim, PuTTY and Cygwin console windows on Windows, but ... in Gnome Terminal on Ubuntu. Thank you, Microsoft!