10 ms·
Mensch -- A coding font
- rkalla 16y agoI got a kick out of the post, how he starts off with the intent of fixing the "0" and then I quick-scrolled down to the screenshot and noticed there were a lot more corrections than just the "0" -- that's totally something I would have done too once I had the font opened in an editor :) Either way, really like the widened GT and LT chars for coding, thanks!
- zavulon 16y agoI would definitely write the whole blog post in this font.
- baddox 16y agoIt looks fine, but I think I'll always have trouble finding a coding font to replace Consolas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolas
- gxti 16y agoAgreed, I've been using Consolas on linux for quite a while and can find no fault with it.
- ihodes 16y agoI love Consolas, but Inconsolata (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconsolata http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconsolata) is a nice, friendly, take on it. I'd check it out if you haven't already–it's what I now use exclusively!
- martian 16y agoA great comparison of fonts that puts Inconsolata at the top. http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts Inconsolata is also what I use exclusively. I make a point to install it on any new box that I'm going to be using regularly.
- JeffL 16y agoThanks for the link. Note that it says Inconsolata is only at the top over Consolas because Consolas isn't free.
- telemachos 16y agoI love Inconsolata. I hate the curly quotes. If you feel the same, check out Inconsolata-dz: http://nodnod.net/2009/feb/12/adding-straight-single-and-double-quotes-inconsola/ http://nodnod.net/2009/feb/12/adding-straight-single-and-dou...
- baddox 16y agoJust tried it out on Windows 7 with ClearType (same settings I use with Consolas). I don't know if there's a problem with the way ClearType is rendering the font or what, but it looks terrible on my system. Is ClearType supposed to be disabled or what? Screenshots: 11pt http://i.imgur.com/Weq4G.png http://i.imgur.com/Weq4G.png 12pt http://i.imgur.com/L4UDZ.png http://i.imgur.com/L4UDZ.png
- copper 16y agoIt isn't much better without ClearType, either. Inconsolata looks a /lot/ better on linux, so it could be something wrong with the font hinting.
- bryanh 16y agoSame thing here. Seems e isn't letting me disable cleartype either.
- lut4rp 16y agoYes, it will look weird because Consolas was designed specifically for ClearType (which is why it looks nowhere as good on OS X). Inconsolata was designed without it. Similarly, Monaco doesn't look half as good on Windows :) Text rendering differs on OS X and Windows.
- Terretta 16y agoI'm on OSX, and suggest some alternatives to Consolas above: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1454649 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1454649
- wdewind 16y agoBeen looking for a good programming font, and was disappointed that the OP was not one, so thanks!
- DannoHung 16y agoIt is literally Microsoft's best contribution to fonts ever.
- deno 16y agoAfter Comic Sans.
- machrider 16y agoSort of off-topic: I changed my Rxvt font in .Xresources from Envy Code R to Inconsolata to try it out, and the colors in my terminal got darker. Changing the font back to Envy Code R makes them bright again. (I use a dark background and normally the bright flavors of green, cyan, blue, etc.). Why would changing the font affect the brightness of the colors in the terminal?
- Terretta 16y agoConsolas was designed for ClearType, but on a Mac, Consolas seems a touch heavy to me. Lucida Sans Typewriter and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono are also somewhat heavy, as are Menlo and Mensch. I find Andale Mono to be the perfect blend of legibility, distinctive character forms, and lightness, for black letters on white background. With its shorter and rounded letterforms providing a sense of white space between lines, I suspect this font is reminding me of highly legible daisy wheel printouts. This is my font of choice for both coding and plain-text email. It's not as widely known, but people who use it become somewhat fanatical. In Terminal I use amber on black, and find Monaco 10pt. better because of the line height and old school terminal feel. I suspect this font reminds me of the plotter-style vector fonts pre-dating MS-DOS. Like Consolas, Monaco has a slash through the zero, which I much prefer. Just for fun, try http://sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/ http://sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/ in 20 pt (15 pt in Windows) terminal window. It's a DEC VT220 terminal glyph font complete with raster lines.
- tedreed 16y agoIn the rendered example, the dot in the zero is too low.
- drivingmenuts 16y agothe angle brackets seem to point a little high. probably because they are not weighted evenly from top to bottom.
- ANH 16y agoAnd there's more to the angle brackets than enclosing typenames. I'm thinking stream operators, for which a shorter angle bracket seems more appropriate. Like the rest, though.
- bodhi 16y agoI agree. I'd say it's because they are balanced across the total height of the font, rather than the x-height. Sitting next to capital letters or numbers it would probably look ok, but that size dwarfs the lower-case letters.
- chrismealy 16y agoNice work. I'm going to use it. Good lord, we programmers are spoiled.
- rnicholson 16y agoI like to use 'particular' instead
- confuzatron 16y ago'reading HN and changing our programming fonts, instead of programming'.
- augustl 16y agoThe changed l (letter) looks a lot like 1 (number). Perhaps someone using the font can confirm or deny this?
- MartinCron 16y agoFrom the article: I think the original artist drew the L weirdly to make it extremely clear that it’s not a one, but if you draw a gothic one, the difference is obvious even with a simpler L.
- amh 16y agoMaybe he claims the difference is obvious, but not to my aging eyes (especially at smaller point sizes). Sadly, getting older has had more influence over my choice of fonts than pure stylistic preferences.
- zb 16y agoAnd that might be fine if you see an l and a 1 next to each other and you want to know which is which. In the real world where you see one or the other and want to know which it is, this is really unhelpful.
- MartinCron 16y agoI'm not saying I agree with his decision, I was just pointing out that it was a deliberate and thoughtful decision :)
- delackner 16y agoIndeed I have not yet seen a monospaced font that distinguished l (el) and 1 (one) meaningfully. Hell the font I am typing with in the compose field differs by perhaps one pixel.
- zb 16y agoWell, as you can see from the article, Menlo does. Monaco is also very similar in this respect. Even if you're not on a Mac it shouldn't be difficult to find one or two.
- BoppreH 16y agoDoes it handle latin 1 and 2 characters? á é í à ã õ ô, etc
- ars 16y agoThe original DejaVu Sans Mono it's based on does, so I would guess this does too. In fact DejaVu includes pretty much all of unicode.
- fredoliveira 16y agoI like most of the changes, and I am definitely going to try it out (I'm using Inconsolata and must say I love it quite dearly). There's one thing I can say I don't like about Mensch, however, and that is the lowercase "q". It is very close to an "a" or "alpha". Reading "query" in the rendered example feels wrong.
- chopsueyar 16y agoNo more fakakta zeroes. You sir, are a mensch.
- nezumi 16y agoLooks nice, although the changes are given away by hinting problems on my Linux box: http://ploader.net/files/92540a2c2b68cfe8b49f2301f628f860.png http://ploader.net/files/92540a2c2b68cfe8b49f2301f628f860.pn... (I've no idea what it would take to fix this but I can provide more info about the system on request.) Here's a nice oddball coding font for you: http://www.dafont.com/monofur.font http://www.dafont.com/monofur.font
- jfr 16y agoWas it installed during that preview? If the font isn't installed, the font viewer can't do the hinting.
- ars 16y agoI like it, except for the 3.
- jws 16y agoI don't know, typing two zeroes in a row gets a little eyeballey. And, unrelated, if you are thinking the serif font for the prose on that page looked like some ghastly font from the early days of printing. It is! Legitima is the digital revival of a typeface used in Cicceide Legitima, a book written by Francesco Lazzarelli and printed in Venice, ca. 1694. To be fair, Legitima is designed to work in smaller sizes and going smaller than the 19pt on the page makes it look much better.
- commandar 16y agoPersonally, I found myself wondering why I'd want to use a font from somebody that cared little enough about readability to use a font like that on their webpage.
- jsharpe 16y agoYou have to use some type of font smoothing (e.g. ClearType) for it to look acceptable. It looks quite nice once you put it on.
- stesch 16y agoOh, I haven't seen the ugly font on the page. I use NoScript.
- darrenkopp 16y agoA great font i've been using is envy code r. http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-coding-font-released http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-cod...
- sandGorgon 16y agoI use Monofur on my terminal and Anonymous Pro for my editor (distributed under the Open Font License) Anonymous Pro includes embedded bitmaps for specific sizes.
- compay 16y agoI'm always impressed by people who know how to code, and also have a good understanding of the subtleties of typography. Bravo!
- jacobolus 16y agoThis guy clearly doesn’t understand the subtleties of typography, given some of the edits he’s made to this font.... that’s okay though, because if he likes it better and it works for him, everyone’s still happy.
- compay 16y agoWell, I guess you can just count me in the "knows how to code" camp. :) I know very little about typography but find the subject pretty interesting.
- makmanalp 16y agoAlmost every single one of his replacements hurts my eyes. The 0 I like, the 1 looks like it was chopped from the left, the z-3 is ugly, the and sign could have been nice but the top part is too small and off to the left, the Q's tail looks abominable, and those angle brackets look as large as Cleopatra's nose. Maybe it's just me. To each his own I guess!
- shaddi 16y agoI tried it out on my Ubuntu box and realized it's practically indistinguishable from the default Monospace font: http://sha.ddih.org/f/monospace.png http://sha.ddih.org/f/monospace.png http://sha.ddih.org/f/mensch.png http://sha.ddih.org/f/mensch.png
- aquateen 16y agoCromulent use of the word 'embiggen'.
- plaes 16y agoI'm using terminus font: http://www.is-vn.bg/hamster/ http://www.is-vn.bg/hamster/
- aerique 16y agoSame here. I always come back to this font after a safari through font country looking for alternative programming fonts. I really like the 'square' look. I've tried most other fonts for a while and DejaVu Sans Mono for the longest time because it supports so many of the unicode characters, but I really don't need them when programming (or doing most other things on the computer, but then I come from a region where the default ASCII set is almost good enough).
- nuxi 16y agoHave you tried SGI screen? It's a bitmap font (ASCII-only), great for small sizes (if that's your cup of tea). http://imgur.com/9xJlN.png http://imgur.com/9xJlN.png
- chmike 16y agoI also prefer the dot in the zero. But the l shape is too close of the number 1. The original font is better on this regard. There is more space between the dot and the bar in the exclamation mark which makes it more different of avertical bar.
- cracki 16y agothe example does not show his "improvements" on the 1-digit/L-letter shapes...
- Amnon 16y agoI tried it in Visual Stdio and noticed this font has ligatures. as between f and i in the word "specified". It looks horrible in a fixed width font since the other letters are separated from each other. Additionally, somehow Visual Studio treats the letter pair as a single letter, so you can only select or erase the pair as whole. Not very usable.
- rudd 16y agoI don't have Menlo on this computer (still on Leopard), but from what I can tell from comparing this font to my current coding font, Droid Sans Mono, they must be very similar. It's okay, but it looks like all the things that annoy me about Mensch are the things that were changed from Menlo!
- mildweed 16y agoPanic Sans is also a similar, good coding font. http://vnoel.wordpress.com/2007/04/25/coda-coding-font-panic-sans/ http://vnoel.wordpress.com/2007/04/25/coda-coding-font-panic...
- cabalamat 16y agoThe l looks too much like a 1. This is a big no-no on fonts to be used for programming. (As is making sure 0 and O are distinct.) Also, angle brackets look too similar to parentheses -- <> (). Here's some source code that would look terrible in this font: (if (< item x) (<< lessx item) (<< gex item)))
- fragmede 16y agoReally? http://imgur.com/OaonC.png http://imgur.com/OaonC.png
- cabalamat 16y agoThat's curious. The angle brackets on this png are fine, unlike on the examples on the original page. I've just downloaded Mensch, and on my box too the angle brackets are fine, with an angle between the lines of about 55 degrees, as opposed to about 85 degrees on the original page; so it would appear the downloadable font is different from that described no the page.