20 ms·

Show HN: Cascadia Code, a Font for Windows Terminal and VSCode

164 points by hmsync 7y ago

abakus 7y ago
It is a nice font, but a bit too wide for my taste.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
m0zg 7y ago
MS can't really win against its own Consolas. If you haven't tried Consolas, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. Would be cool if MS opensourced that, if they can.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Unfortunately, it's unlikely that Microsoft has the means to open source Consolas as it (along with most of the rest of the Office C-Family fonts) was a commission from / commercial partnership with Monotype (company/foundry; albeit I think it was Ascender at the time but M&A since then it's definitely Monotype that owns the commercial rights today). Commercial licensing info: http://catalog.monotype.com/family/microsoft-corporation/consolas http://catalog.monotype.com/family/microsoft-corporation/con...
  - m0zg 7y ago
    MS is a trillion dollar company. It has the means to do whatever it wants to do.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      The keyword I used was "unlikely". The point being that it would be a coordinated effort between Microsoft and some other company (Monotype), increasing the unlikelihood, because it would require joint effort. Regardless of Microsoft's market cap, it would still have to deal with the lawyers and royalty concerns of its partner, it couldn't just unilaterally decide to open source it without negotiations. Given the nature of font design, Microsoft may not even have access the "source" for Consolas today, and maybe/probably only licenses the final TTFs from Monotype. (Plus, it's an old enough font that whatever "source" there may exist would only be glyphs in various proprietary formats and build tools/chains that would require conversion to tools more appropriate to open source.) Yes, Microsoft has the resources to do all of that, given enough time and it becoming enough of a priority, but the likelihood of that becoming a priority one would directly assume is related to how much effort that would take. It would likely take a lot of effort.
      - m0zg 7y ago
        10M would make Monotype pee itself. MS does not require board approval for deals $100M or less.
- Stratoscope 7y ago
  Consolas has been my favorite monospaced font for years. I prefer proportional fonts for reading and writing code, and my current favorite is another Microsoft font, Trebuchet MS. But when I need a monospaced font, like in a terminal, Consolas is it.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > But when I need a proportional font, like in a terminal, Consolas is it. You mean monospaced font? I’m curious why you use proportional fonts when writing code but not in your terminal.
    - Stratoscope 7y ago
      Whoops, sorry for the very confusing typo, and thanks for noting it! Corrected now. That's what I get for commenting on HN when I should have already called it a night... :-) With the typo corrected, yes I do prefer proportional fonts (and as mentioned especially Trebuchet MS), and all the editors I use support them. I just find them much more readable to my eyes than monospaced. Except in a terminal where apps assume monospaced font - so that's where Consolas shines.
- ggregoire 7y ago
  And Consolas with ligatures: https://github.com/somq/consolas-ligaturized https://github.com/somq/consolas-ligaturized
  - m0zg 7y ago
    No license: can't use.
- ddispaltro 7y ago
  I completely agree, the only monospaced font I've used for the last 5+ years. I am however, giving this one a full go.
- thefz 7y ago
  The font I always fall back to in Visual Studio after trying others. It's so clear.
tony 7y ago
Microsoft is just on a roll when it comes to open source. - Windows Terminal is pretty solid, and fast. Dare I say, nearing rxvt-unicode/kitty speed. There are some remaining terminal corruption with tmux + vim sessions, but soon enough it'll be replacing hyper/conemu for me. - WSL 2 alleviates file system issues that plagued WSL. I recently wiped debian off my Thinkpad because there's no point, I get everything I need from WSL 2. And I can start to dabble with learning C# / Visual Studio. - https://github.com/microsoft/AirSim https://github.com/microsoft/AirSim This thing, which has support for Unity and Unreal, and is MIT licensed - VSCode: They ship a new feature release every month I guess? I was happy with it 1 year or two ago, but now they also have WSL 2 integration. This editor works across platforms on MacOS as well. - Windows 10: Snapping, HiDPI, sound management, drivers just work, lots of apps in windows store, if not you have everything in chocolatey anyway. Steam, with all the games, at full speed. macOS is no longer clearly superior the consumer OS space. Windows 10 is better IMO. The best part of Windows though is hardware choice. Unlike Apple where you're stuck with an expensive metal wedge, a keyboard you may not (or may!) like, that at least for me gets miserably slow after 3 years, in Windows-land you can pick Dell, Lenovo, HP, so on. You can build your own Desktop, and pick good quality components that last, that aren't soldered together wastefully. Generally speaking, it's more DIY / Hacker friendly. Maybe Microsoft is getting stronger, or Apple is losing touch with open source stuff trying to push their app / boutique hardware business model. But without open source and standards, what will be left to sustain it all if/when their app/hardware market sours?
- scalanewaccount 7y ago
  I'm seriously considering moving back to Windows from Arch. I miss some software. Can you give some downsides of WSL2 so I know you're being impartial (I am) and to help me make a decision. I wasted a few days with WSL1 and don't want to repeat that.
  - throwaway13249 7y ago
    Just minor issues: You need to be on the insider programmer which forces telemetry and means you have a PITA windows style upgrade every other week (and the nagging associated with it). Whilst you can read /mnt/c/ you can't read virtual file systems such as Google drive stream /mnt/g/ is just empty. You need to do a bit of fuckery like pinning your ssh-agent to a known file socket and test this in your bash/zsh startup - not a biggie since you arent starting this off your WM No X support - there are third party x viewers though but not officially endorsed. So no apps like xkeynav and xkill. None of the intellij ecosystem have WSL support - sure you can set the terminal to be use wsl.exe but stuff like using your WSL2 distro's openssh config or using the agent running in your WSL2 etc... arent there or coming, VSCode is lightyears ahead in this department due to the way its modelled. Sadly intellij team aren't thinking in the same way of the vscode team, so instead of proxying through a remote demon they are thinking of doing something like reading //wsl$/distro/home/you/.ssh/config instead, hacking WSL support in their ssh/git bits
vaikrunta 7y ago
This is a good looking font. Will use it for a while. :)
manigandham 7y ago
This is pretty neat. Here's the overview blog post: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/cascadia-code/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/cascadia-code/ FYI, there's also the "Input" font for coding: https://input.fontbureau.com/ https://input.fontbureau.com/ and of course "Fira Code" which became popular for ligatures: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode
degski 7y ago
Did anyone look at some code in Visual Studio with this font. You'll be surprised how `!=` looks like with this font (C++), it's pretty cool [and I've never seen anything like it before]!
- guessmyname 7y ago
  > You'll be surprised how `!=` looks like with this font […] For anyone curious, you can see it here [1] (check the last character). [1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/cascadia-code/master/images/cascadia-code-characters.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/cascadia-code/ma...
  - degski 7y ago
    It looks different from that, let's have the spoiler: it looks like '=/=', but with the equal signs attached and the forward slash just 'on top' of it.
    - auscompgeek 7y ago
      I think you're trying to describe an elongated `≠`?
      - degski 7y ago
        Yip. It also contracts the '==', i.e. they are shown attached as one elongated '='.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - throwaway8941 7y ago
    Not the best decision I think, too much resemblance to the division assignment operator: x /= 10;
    - degski 7y ago
nitinreddy88 7y ago
After long time, I found a font which is really eye soothing for windows terminal. If Powerline support gets added, it will be one of the best.
- dstaley 7y ago
  Scott Hanselman actually published a video on using Cascadia with Powerline! [1] [1] https://youtu.be/oHhiMf_6exY https://youtu.be/oHhiMf_6exY
johncoltrane 7y ago
And not other uses?
marco_craveiro 7y ago
This font looks great on Emacs, going to move away from Inconsolata!
sakesun 7y ago
Just tried Cascadia Code with Emacs. I think Monofur is still better for me. Larger, easier to read, and even more number of text lines shown on screen.
- GordonS 7y ago
  > Larger...more number of text lines shown on screen Surely that's down to the font size, which you can change?
  - sakesun 7y ago
    In general, you cannot have Larger text with more number of text lines at the same time. With Monofur the text are wider and more clear, and, for the same vertical space, more number of lines than Cascadia.
michaelchris 7y ago
Still can't beat Iosevka Slab.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
mvts 7y ago
No umlaute - can't use it. Looks nice though.
- subbz 7y ago
  Check out PragmataPro. Has everything a man needs.
  - m3andros 7y ago
    That's a cool font! Have you tried Operator by Hoefler Text? Source: https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-operator https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-operator
locusm 7y ago
Keen to try this and see how it stacks up against Dank Mono.
archie2 7y ago
Been using this font as my daily driver for a few days now - switched from Iosevka to this and I'll be using it for the foreseable future. Great work Microsoft!
teilo 7y ago
I wish some thought would be given to alternate widths for monospaced fonts. Once I got used to the narrow width of Iosevka[†], all these other admittedly wonderful terminal/code fonts lost their appeal to me. Everything else just looks fat now. [†]https://typeof.net/Iosevka https://typeof.net/Iosevka
- aendruk 7y ago
  Even better, Iosevka just gained an experimental proportional-width variant that still has all the programming ligatures. I've been opting into that on a per–language or project basis.
- pvinis 7y ago
  I completely agree! I came to Iosevka for the looks, but now I don't want to leave because of the width. :D
  - pstadler 7y ago
    Oh boy, same here. Glad I found some soulmates! Input Mono Compressed comes close though.
ctvo 7y ago
am I the only person who has trouble imagining what a font will look like from just a row of alphanumeric characters? I'm always wishing for a screenshot of it used in complex editor situations when these posts pop up.
- dole 7y ago
  No, being just a little unsatisfied with Consolas, I thought this might be the answer, until I loaded it up in VSCode. A little too serif-y.
teilo 7y ago
Pet peeve: I think anyone designing a terminal / code font in 2019 should be including Powerline glyphs.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code/issues/10 https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code/issues/10 http://feeds.hanselman.com/~/606974448/0/scotthanselman~Patching-the-new-Cascadia-Code-to-include-Powerline-Glyphs-and-other-Nerd-Fonts-for-the-Windows-Terminal.aspx http://feeds.hanselman.com/~/606974448/0/scotthanselman~Patc...

164 points by hmsync 7y ago

abakus 7y ago

It is a nice font, but a bit too wide for my taste.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

m0zg 7y ago

MS can't really win against its own Consolas. If you haven't tried Consolas, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. Would be cool if MS opensourced that, if they can.

WorldMaker 7y ago
Unfortunately, it's unlikely that Microsoft has the means to open source Consolas as it (along with most of the rest of the Office C-Family fonts) was a commission from / commercial partnership with Monotype (company/foundry; albeit I think it was Ascender at the time but M&A since then it's definitely Monotype that owns the commercial rights today). Commercial licensing info: http://catalog.monotype.com/family/microsoft-corporation/consolas http://catalog.monotype.com/family/microsoft-corporation/con...
- m0zg 7y ago
  MS is a trillion dollar company. It has the means to do whatever it wants to do.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    The keyword I used was "unlikely". The point being that it would be a coordinated effort between Microsoft and some other company (Monotype), increasing the unlikelihood, because it would require joint effort. Regardless of Microsoft's market cap, it would still have to deal with the lawyers and royalty concerns of its partner, it couldn't just unilaterally decide to open source it without negotiations. Given the nature of font design, Microsoft may not even have access the "source" for Consolas today, and maybe/probably only licenses the final TTFs from Monotype. (Plus, it's an old enough font that whatever "source" there may exist would only be glyphs in various proprietary formats and build tools/chains that would require conversion to tools more appropriate to open source.) Yes, Microsoft has the resources to do all of that, given enough time and it becoming enough of a priority, but the likelihood of that becoming a priority one would directly assume is related to how much effort that would take. It would likely take a lot of effort.
    - m0zg 7y ago
      10M would make Monotype pee itself. MS does not require board approval for deals $100M or less.
Stratoscope 7y ago
Consolas has been my favorite monospaced font for years. I prefer proportional fonts for reading and writing code, and my current favorite is another Microsoft font, Trebuchet MS. But when I need a monospaced font, like in a terminal, Consolas is it.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > But when I need a proportional font, like in a terminal, Consolas is it. You mean monospaced font? I’m curious why you use proportional fonts when writing code but not in your terminal.
  - Stratoscope 7y ago
    Whoops, sorry for the very confusing typo, and thanks for noting it! Corrected now. That's what I get for commenting on HN when I should have already called it a night... :-) With the typo corrected, yes I do prefer proportional fonts (and as mentioned especially Trebuchet MS), and all the editors I use support them. I just find them much more readable to my eyes than monospaced. Except in a terminal where apps assume monospaced font - so that's where Consolas shines.
ggregoire 7y ago
And Consolas with ligatures: https://github.com/somq/consolas-ligaturized https://github.com/somq/consolas-ligaturized
- m0zg 7y ago
  No license: can't use.
ddispaltro 7y ago
I completely agree, the only monospaced font I've used for the last 5+ years. I am however, giving this one a full go.
thefz 7y ago
The font I always fall back to in Visual Studio after trying others. It's so clear.

tony 7y ago

Microsoft is just on a roll when it comes to open source. - Windows Terminal is pretty solid, and fast. Dare I say, nearing rxvt-unicode/kitty speed. There are some remaining terminal corruption with tmux + vim sessions, but soon enough it'll be replacing hyper/conemu for me. - WSL 2 alleviates file system issues that plagued WSL. I recently wiped debian off my Thinkpad because there's no point, I get everything I need from WSL 2. And I can start to dabble with learning C# / Visual Studio. - https://github.com/microsoft/AirSim https://github.com/microsoft/AirSim This thing, which has support for Unity and Unreal, and is MIT licensed - VSCode: They ship a new feature release every month I guess? I was happy with it 1 year or two ago, but now they also have WSL 2 integration. This editor works across platforms on MacOS as well. - Windows 10: Snapping, HiDPI, sound management, drivers just work, lots of apps in windows store, if not you have everything in chocolatey anyway. Steam, with all the games, at full speed. macOS is no longer clearly superior the consumer OS space. Windows 10 is better IMO. The best part of Windows though is hardware choice. Unlike Apple where you're stuck with an expensive metal wedge, a keyboard you may not (or may!) like, that at least for me gets miserably slow after 3 years, in Windows-land you can pick Dell, Lenovo, HP, so on. You can build your own Desktop, and pick good quality components that last, that aren't soldered together wastefully. Generally speaking, it's more DIY / Hacker friendly. Maybe Microsoft is getting stronger, or Apple is losing touch with open source stuff trying to push their app / boutique hardware business model. But without open source and standards, what will be left to sustain it all if/when their app/hardware market sours?

scalanewaccount 7y ago
I'm seriously considering moving back to Windows from Arch. I miss some software. Can you give some downsides of WSL2 so I know you're being impartial (I am) and to help me make a decision. I wasted a few days with WSL1 and don't want to repeat that.
- throwaway13249 7y ago
  Just minor issues: You need to be on the insider programmer which forces telemetry and means you have a PITA windows style upgrade every other week (and the nagging associated with it). Whilst you can read /mnt/c/ you can't read virtual file systems such as Google drive stream /mnt/g/ is just empty. You need to do a bit of fuckery like pinning your ssh-agent to a known file socket and test this in your bash/zsh startup - not a biggie since you arent starting this off your WM No X support - there are third party x viewers though but not officially endorsed. So no apps like xkeynav and xkill. None of the intellij ecosystem have WSL support - sure you can set the terminal to be use wsl.exe but stuff like using your WSL2 distro's openssh config or using the agent running in your WSL2 etc... arent there or coming, VSCode is lightyears ahead in this department due to the way its modelled. Sadly intellij team aren't thinking in the same way of the vscode team, so instead of proxying through a remote demon they are thinking of doing something like reading //wsl$/distro/home/you/.ssh/config instead, hacking WSL support in their ssh/git bits

vaikrunta 7y ago

This is a good looking font. Will use it for a while. :)

manigandham 7y ago

This is pretty neat. Here's the overview blog post: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/cascadia-code/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/cascadia-code/ FYI, there's also the "Input" font for coding: https://input.fontbureau.com/ https://input.fontbureau.com/ and of course "Fira Code" which became popular for ligatures: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

degski 7y ago

Did anyone look at some code in Visual Studio with this font. You'll be surprised how `!=` looks like with this font (C++), it's pretty cool [and I've never seen anything like it before]!

guessmyname 7y ago
> You'll be surprised how `!=` looks like with this font […] For anyone curious, you can see it here [1] (check the last character). [1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/cascadia-code/master/images/cascadia-code-characters.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/cascadia-code/ma...
- degski 7y ago
  It looks different from that, let's have the spoiler: it looks like '=/=', but with the equal signs attached and the forward slash just 'on top' of it.
  - auscompgeek 7y ago
    I think you're trying to describe an elongated `≠`?
    - degski 7y ago
      Yip. It also contracts the '==', i.e. they are shown attached as one elongated '='.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- throwaway8941 7y ago
  Not the best decision I think, too much resemblance to the division assignment operator: x /= 10;
  - degski 7y ago

nitinreddy88 7y ago

After long time, I found a font which is really eye soothing for windows terminal. If Powerline support gets added, it will be one of the best.

dstaley 7y ago
Scott Hanselman actually published a video on using Cascadia with Powerline! [1] [1] https://youtu.be/oHhiMf_6exY https://youtu.be/oHhiMf_6exY

johncoltrane 7y ago

And not other uses?

marco_craveiro 7y ago

This font looks great on Emacs, going to move away from Inconsolata!

sakesun 7y ago

Just tried Cascadia Code with Emacs. I think Monofur is still better for me. Larger, easier to read, and even more number of text lines shown on screen.

GordonS 7y ago
> Larger...more number of text lines shown on screen Surely that's down to the font size, which you can change?
- sakesun 7y ago
  In general, you cannot have Larger text with more number of text lines at the same time. With Monofur the text are wider and more clear, and, for the same vertical space, more number of lines than Cascadia.

michaelchris 7y ago

Still can't beat Iosevka Slab.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

mvts 7y ago

No umlaute - can't use it. Looks nice though.

subbz 7y ago
Check out PragmataPro. Has everything a man needs.
- m3andros 7y ago
  That's a cool font! Have you tried Operator by Hoefler Text? Source: https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-operator https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-operator

locusm 7y ago

Keen to try this and see how it stacks up against Dank Mono.

archie2 7y ago

Been using this font as my daily driver for a few days now - switched from Iosevka to this and I'll be using it for the foreseable future. Great work Microsoft!

teilo 7y ago

I wish some thought would be given to alternate widths for monospaced fonts. Once I got used to the narrow width of Iosevka[†], all these other admittedly wonderful terminal/code fonts lost their appeal to me. Everything else just looks fat now. [†]https://typeof.net/Iosevka https://typeof.net/Iosevka

aendruk 7y ago
Even better, Iosevka just gained an experimental proportional-width variant that still has all the programming ligatures. I've been opting into that on a per–language or project basis.
pvinis 7y ago
I completely agree! I came to Iosevka for the looks, but now I don't want to leave because of the width. :D
- pstadler 7y ago
  Oh boy, same here. Glad I found some soulmates! Input Mono Compressed comes close though.

ctvo 7y ago

am I the only person who has trouble imagining what a font will look like from just a row of alphanumeric characters? I'm always wishing for a screenshot of it used in complex editor situations when these posts pop up.

dole 7y ago
No, being just a little unsatisfied with Consolas, I thought this might be the answer, until I loaded it up in VSCode. A little too serif-y.

teilo 7y ago

Pet peeve: I think anyone designing a terminal / code font in 2019 should be including Powerline glyphs.

WorldMaker 7y ago
https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code/issues/10 https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code/issues/10 http://feeds.hanselman.com/~/606974448/0/scotthanselman~Patching-the-new-Cascadia-Code-to-include-Powerline-Glyphs-and-other-Nerd-Fonts-for-the-Windows-Terminal.aspx http://feeds.hanselman.com/~/606974448/0/scotthanselman~Patc...