4 ms·
I love that they actually included Bigelow's explanation of each decision made. So often (especially in the realm of programming fonts, it seems) decisions on l
by jballanc 10y ago
I love that they actually included Bigelow's explanation of each decision made. So often (especially in the realm of programming fonts, it seems) decisions on letter forms in new fonts seem to be made "because it looks nice", but there is, in fact, a science behind it all. Indeed, Go Mono ticks every item I look for in a programming font (one of only 2 or 3 programming fonts that does):
- slashed 0
- easy differentiation of 1, i, l, and |
- open lower-case g
- proper kerning and adequate width of r, n, and m
Unfortunately, I don't see myself switching away from Menlo to Go Mono for a silly and purely aesthetic reason: 5 point raised baseline * . Yes, yes...I know that's how pretty much every font has done * since forever, but after working with the vertically centered, six-pointed * in Menlo (and SF Mono), it's hard to go back.
- dbl9 10y agoDo you write OCaml or C (comments) by any chance? I've often found it hard to discover a typeface that has (* this is a comment *) vertically centered. My usual choice is Fira Mono because it looks great and centers * vertically, though I would love a serif monospace font. Maybe Go Mono will be revised but I doubt it will be updated anytime soon. When you say "6 point" do you mean it's bigger than usual? Is there a place to obtain SF Mono without an Apple Developer account if you don't happen to have a macOS installation handy?
- jballanc 10y agoI've found the vertically centered "" to be far superior almost everywhere. Definitely for comments, but even for pointers (yes, I do write a fair bit of C) it becomes clearer that the glyph is part of the type signature, and not just a footnote. By "6 point" I mean the character itself has 6 "arms", instead of the typical 5. For my taste, it makes the glyph feel more balanced. There is this repo: https://github.com/hbin/top-programming-fonts https://github.com/hbin/top-programming-fonts . Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the legality of obtaining Menlo without OS X/macOS. It is a variation on Bitstream Vera Sans, which is AFAIK Open Source, but I am completely ignorant when it comes to how licenses apply to fonts (as opposed to code). As for SF Mono, that seems to be impossible to obtain even if* you have macOS and an Apple Developer account (only the UI fonts are available for download). I managed to dig them out of the Xcode application bundle and install them as system-wide fonts, but was greeted with a very scary warning stating that installing these fonts could destabilize my entire system (so far my OS is still running, though)...YMMV.