16 ms·

JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

506 points by nizmow 7y ago

thrower123 7y ago
I've never understood the obsession and bikeshedding over fonts. I can appreciate that there are people who spend a huge amount of time agonizing over the details and tradeoffs making these things, but... Arial, Times New Roman and Consolas are more than good enough for my purposes.
- royjacobs 7y ago
  This could be an indication that you are not the target audience.
nkrisc 7y ago
I was disappointed that despite presenting the cookie banner as if it were a terminal, the options did not accept keyboard input [Y]es, I agree [N]o, thanks Ok on topic: I'm never sure what to think of these "developer" fonts that make use of ligatures for combinations like ==, >=, ->, =>, etc. On one hand they do look really nice, but I always can't help but feel it would actually make things just a little bit harder to scan and parse quickly. I do find it a very pleasing font to read, however.
- nizmow 7y ago
  I agree about ligatures. I use them whenever I can because they look cool, but sometimes I think it actually is to my detriment. For example, if I mistakenly type `->` it looks very similar to a ligatured `-->`.
- blackhaz 7y ago
  Anything printed or displayed in that font will confuse people unfamiliar with that font's ligature system as well. I say thee nay!
- Dirlewanger 7y ago
  Yup, also don't like ligatures. They're a solution looking for a problem. Will however try this font when it drops in IDE updates.
- ebg13 7y ago
  Same. Any font that claims to be for programming but includes ligatures gets a "no thanks" from me accompanied by a bit of sadness because they often mar otherwise nicely designed typefaces.
  - IAmEveryone 7y ago
    You really don’t have to use the ligatures, do you?
    - ScottFree 7y ago
      I don't know about other programs, but iTerm has a checkbox option to enable/disable ligatures.
      - ShowMeWhatUGot 7y ago
        So does JetBrains IDE's and VS Code. I don't know of any program that forces you to use ligatures just because the typeface supports it.
        vblinden 7y ago
        Visual Studio (the full blown IDE)
        evansj 7y ago
        Add to settings.json: "editor.fontLigatures": false (Edit: sorry, just realised you were talking about the full blown Visual Studio, not VSCode)
    - dnadler 7y ago
      You don't; there's a checkbox to toggle them, and it defaults to 'off'.
  - Joeri 7y ago
    For me it is the reverse, I only want ligatures now and feel a programming font isn’t done until it supports them.
- lelf 7y ago
  Agree about ligatures too. Many of those are pretty unpleasing to read (AKA typographically wrong), e. g. /=.
- SloopJon 7y ago
  Emacs has a minor mode (prettify-symbols-mode, I think) that makes substitutions like these. I tried it for a couple of months, but decided that it wasn't for me.
  - alpaca128 7y ago
    I've recently tried Emacs for a few weeks and prettify-symbols-mode doesn't look nearly as good in my opinion, as the scale and style of the symbols isn't consistent with the font. Also I never got any symbol out of it in any situation except an arrow and lambda. I'd much prefer if Emacs just supported actual ligatures.
  - weavie 7y ago
    It is possible to take this too far.. https://imgur.com/a/5NP6FWx https://imgur.com/a/5NP6FWx But it did keep me entertained for a bit.
- vishwajeetv 7y ago
  It accepts keyboard input, but you have to click on the terminal first.
  - nkrisc 7y ago
    Then shame on them for not focusing it by default.
    - drchickensalad 7y ago
      I'll be honest I can imagine it's on risky legal ground. A stray y key hit when doing anything on the page accepts the agreement? For all their faults, all other implementations are much more explicit and resilient than this, as they require a targeted click.
      - GordonS 7y ago
        > they require a targeted click As opposed to a targeted key press? Seriously, what's the difference? It's very common for GUIs, and even TUIs, to accept key presses for actions
    - urbanjunkie 7y ago
      Get over yourself you hysterical little child.
- jddj 7y ago
  With a good deal of skepticism, I switched the environment where I do about half of my work to a font with ligatures some time ago. Just to try it out for a while. I happily forgot that I had done it as a trial, and upon reading this headline caught myself hoping that there would be ligatures. I actually find that it provides an almost haptic feedback when going between things like =, == and ===, and I think I miss it just a little when I don't have it. As for the font itself, I like it but slightly prefer the style of Fira Code.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    For some reason, I just don't like the spacing in Fira Code... I really like Inconsolata/Consolas myself... I've tried both, but it just feels off to me. Aside: Hopefully this font has box and line art characters and they align properly... this is a huge short coming in a number of fixed-width fonts that should be rectified.
  - veidr 7y ago
    Wow, I didn't think I wanted ligatures and so I never turned them on. But based on your comment, I just tried it and I found that I love it! The little visual blip! when the characters merge does in fact provide a nice little feedback that I've typed the right thing. And also the two-character => arrow in fat-arrow functions always kind of bugged me a little bit and it is nice to have it condensed to a single visual entity. Woo hoo! I will leave ligatures on from now on.
- scoutt 7y ago
  I've just installed this font and tested it with VS Code, and I must say that it is a very nice font. Code is clear and easy to read (C/C++ development). I think I'll keep it for a while. Regarding ligatures, I agree. I could live with the pointer arrow ligature, that's fine and looks nice, but not with the crossed '=' (that is "!=") or the symbol for >=. Call it ageing, but for the moment it stops my code reading flow. So "editor.fontLigatures": false
  - Klathmon 7y ago
    This is why I love how configurable editors are now days. I absolutely adore ligatures in my programming fonts. I've been using FiraCode for at least a year or 2 now, and while i'll be the first to admit that the reason I enabled ligatures was because they looked cool, now I really miss them when they aren't there.
    - lokedhs 7y ago
      I'd much rather see languages take advantage of characters outside of ASCII. There are already symbols such as ⇒ which could be used by a language. This is a nice feature of APL, and the derivatives such as J which use plain ASCII are much less nice to work with.
      - boutad 7y ago
        That seems like it would be difficult to type.
        necovek 7y ago
        What's stopping editors to provide shortcuts akin to ligatures? Eg. typing "=>" would make use of the "follows" sign.
        Piskvorrr 7y ago
        And now you can only type code in the set of blessed editors and correctly displaying fonts. "Make code pretty" should be a matter of presentation, not actual source code. To use your example, typing "=>" could display the "follows" sign, but the string representation should not depend on exotic characters like "ř", "⸙", or "" (is that a box symbol, or "symbol not found in current font"? Oh wait, the HTML input field ate it! See?!).
- Grumbledour 7y ago
  I do love the ligatures in Fira Code. It always makes me happy to see the nice looking <=, >=, !=, !== or ->. I am not so sure about these, though. Maybe a tad to much/to special in some cases? Somehow they don't pop for me the same way.
  - nkrisc 7y ago
    Some of them are a little ambiguous to me. For example, the ligature for #{ looks like it could be #={. I honestly couldn't tell until I selected the text. Some of them are nice, however. Specifically the ones that just tighten up the spacing and make small adjustments. For example, most of the ones that involve a colon I think are an improvement, but still distinct and unambiguous.
  - redisman 7y ago
    Also === in JS and TS turning into three horizontal lines is really nice for my brain (even though lint catches it). Fira coda retina is still my go-to font, this one doesn't look quite as legible.
- Syzygies 7y ago
  Comment characters, and compound operators without ligatures, are ground glass in my eyes. The first thing I checked for here was ligatures; this font would not have gotten five seconds of my time otherwise. If one doesn't want ligatures, one turns them off. No one should design a programming font in 2020 without ligatures, just like no one should design a programming language in 2020 without a language server to handle editor services. In a language like Haskell with many compound operators, the code just looks stupid and irritating without ligatures. I may be at one extreme here, for I absolutely loathe comment characters. I've programmed preprocessors for each language that I use, with defaults that flush left is a comment (to be appropriately syntax colored, and with a convention for blocks that include indentation) and indented is code.
- dorian-graph 7y ago
  I've been using ligatures (Fira) for about 4 months now and love it.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
prashnts 7y ago
Great to see that they’ve attributed Nikita Prokopov, the creator of FiraCode. While not the first, he expanded the ligatures in Hack, and Hasklig fonts and Jetbrains eventually bundled Firacode in their products. Quite a nice course of open source development over the years (I have been following the updates since ~2016).
- iLemming 7y ago
  You know that @tonsky works for them now, right?
  - prashnts 7y ago
    Nope, didn’t. Ah well, good for him regardless.
Ayesh 7y ago
We should take a lesson from the FAQ about license. It is the simplest yet most useful one I have seen! -- May I install JetBrains Mono on my system and use it in any code editor? -> YES. May I make and print a poster with JetBrains Mono? -> YES. May I use JetBrains Mono in my logotype? -> YES. May I use JetBrains Mono on my website? -> YES. May I use JetBrains Mono in my applications? -> YES. May I design my own font based on JetBrains Mono? -> YES. In this case, you need to indicate that it is based on JetBrains Mono. --- Font licensing is not what we developers are used to, but they have done a fine job pointing this out in simple terms.
- IAmEveryone 7y ago
  That’s just a summary of the license, which is Apache 2.0, a software license.
  - theandrewbailey 7y ago
    Usually, fonts are licensed under SIL.[0] Maybe Jetbrains feel that their target audience is more familiar with Apache licenses? [0] https://scripts.sil.org/ofl https://scripts.sil.org/ofl
- RobertRoberts 7y ago
  IANAL - I am pretty certain you can do most of those things with all fonts regardless of license. Copyrights on fonts is almost non-existent. The only thing copyrightable is the actual "code" used in the font. (maybe delivering their files on a website is an issue?) This is based on research I did years ago when dealing with a copyright legal case where I worked. The summation is that you can't copyright the alphabet, so fonts aren't copyrightable. The only one I completely disagree with is the last one though. Requiring attribution for something not copyrightable is kinda silly.
  - marcus_holmes 7y ago
    That's interesting. Because most fonts are protected by a copyright-based license, that they don't seem to have any trouble enforcing. How extensive was your research?
graycrow 7y ago
It is an odd decision not to include Ukrainian in the list of supported languages, despite the fact that the font has all the necessary letters.
- ivanche 7y ago
  Also, Croatian is included twice.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- topka 7y ago
  Ukrainian and a couple of other languages were missed on the list. It's a known issue we're updating on the site right now. Thanks!
- Philipp_n 7y ago
  The list a bit outdated. Will upload correct one soon.
d1egoaz 7y ago
nice font and oss, however I still prefer Iosevka SS04
- vz8 7y ago
  Agreed. After Iosevka, other fonts have felt ... unwieldy. Link for reference: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka Re: "SS04" d1egoaz is referencing Stylistic Set 04, illustrated here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/be5invis/Iosevka/master/images/stylesets.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/be5invis/Iosevka/master/im... In addition to the original version of the font above, there is a patched version with powerline icons (and much more) built in: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/tree/master/patched-fonts/Iosevka https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/tree/master/patched-... which is very handy for emacs/vim modelines.
  - cjbprime 7y ago
    I've even switched to using the proportional Iosevka Aile for programming, here's someone else's screenshot from the last time it was mentioned on HN: https://i.imgur.com/LdzBmpx.png https://i.imgur.com/LdzBmpx.png
  - indemnity 7y ago
    For me, it's the fact that I can create a custom build of Iosevka with preferred weights that look good in the different font rendering systems: Native macOS, Electron (VS Code), Java (IntelliJ). All need different weights to end up looking about the same on the same system. And then being able to turn on/off ligatures, tweak some glyphs. It's hard to give that up.
vishwajeetv 7y ago
Not sure if this is good. They have increased the character height for readability, although I think this will cause more confusion and decrease readability. Adobe's Source code pro has worked for me very well.
dtertman 7y ago
Thanks, I hate it. My most recent update of IntelliJ turned this font on by default and I had to spend an hour trying to figure out what the font used to be. Mono looked squished to me - the intentional favoring of length over width made the whole editor look like I had an aspect ratio problem on my monitor. I appreciate trying to push the envelope and improve ergonomics, but I wish this would have been opt-in for upgraders.
- dubcanada 7y ago
  Mine didn't? What update version did you update to that turned this on by default?
  - dtertman 7y ago
    Ultimate 2019.3 on Mac
    - dubcanada 7y ago
      I have the same version, and when I updated it stayed with Fira Code as the default as per my color schema.
      - dtertman 7y ago
        Yeah, that's the rub it seems - if you picked a default, you kept your default. If you had the old JetBrains default, you now got the new JetBrains default.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  What did it used to be? You could have taken the opportunity to switch to Inconsolata.
  - dtertman 7y ago
    I picked "Monospaced" - I couldn't find any clear documentation of what it was, and that looked OK.
AlanYx 7y ago
It looks like this has the largest x-height of any typeface meant for developers (larger than even Fira Code). While there is research suggesting a large x-height increases readability, I'm wondering whether this doesn't push the x-height just a little too far. CamelCase words no longer stand out visually very easily -- I'm not sure how I feel about that.
- jaywalk 7y ago
  I do find it fairly hard to read. The letters are also too wide in my opinion.
- raihansaputra 7y ago
  Interesting point. Currently trying it out, and the x-height thing matters, similar to another feedback in this thread that says words become disjointed glyphs instead of a "shape". I'll keep this for the moment. Looks much cleaner than Fira Code, but will have to see on the readability side. Another point: not only they have increased the x-height, they also reduced the descender-height (for j,q,p,y) by a lot. I have trouble with function definitions such as post/put/patch or even keywords as response/reject.
  - raihansaputra 7y ago
    If any of you are keeping score or reading through this now, I currently use Input as my main font [0]. Non-monospace is certainly unorthodox, but they do have monospace fonts anyway (and I have to use it with the vscode internal terminal). Input plays much better with lower dpi (90-112) screens with small font sizes (12px font size with -1 zoom on vscode). It looks good too on my Retina screen. [0]: https://input.fontbureau.com/info/ https://input.fontbureau.com/info/
- crazypython 7y ago
  Menlo has a similar size.
ar-nelson 7y ago
I like it, this might finally be the font that gets me to drop Fira Code. It's missing Powerline symbols, though, which is a strange omission for a developer font in 2020.
- lemagedurage 7y ago
  Ah yeah, that's a shame. I can't imagine it will take long before someone creates that though.
- hylaride 7y ago
  This. Makes it hard for me to use it for VIM as my terminal needs Powerline. It's otherwise a very nice font.
  - uncletaco 7y ago
    I think it makes sense that they didn't take powerline into account because I'm assuming this font will become the default for jetbrains editors. Their solution to your wanting to use this font in vim is probably "use vim in our editor instead..."
- prashnts 7y ago
  You could grab a patched copy here: https://www.nerdfonts.com/ https://www.nerdfonts.com/ Aside, I wish some ligature magic for box drawing characters existed. Or at least don’t skip those glyphs, which is unfortunately the case with many monospace fonts.
  - ar-nelson 7y ago
    NerdFonts doesn't have it yet, but I managed to patch it myself using their tool[1]. Seems to have worked without any issues. [1]: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts#option-8-patch-your-own-font https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts#option-8-patch-your-...
memco 7y ago
Nice font. I think it’s a bit sad that the only difference between zero and the letter O is the center dot: usually other fonts make the O slightly more round. This one is squarish. The site design is nice but I found it a bit odd that they didn’t include many of the similar character like O, 0, 1, l, I. That is one of the first things I look for and one of the primary reasons I would choose a new font.
- xixixao 7y ago
  They do include both sets (0, o and 1, l, I). That said I absolutely agree that this is far from the best approach to 0 and o.
  - memco 7y ago
    Sorry I worded my comment poorly. I meant that the code examples at the top don’t seem to prioritize showing those distinctions. If you scroll down they have a separate section but I think it would be nice to showcase all the features on the first samples so that you can see right away how it looks.
- ollien 7y ago
  I absolutely cannot stand dotted zeroes. I really wish it were slashed.
athenot 7y ago
This is a great-looking font, very well put together and a lot of thought put in to make it great for code. That being said, fonts are very personal. I compared it to PT Mono (Public Type, another open-source font) and have these observations: - Ligatures in JB are beautiful. I'm still undecided whether I like them in my code but the aesthetic value is pleasing. - Weight of JB Regular is heavier than PT. - Italics are well designed. - Character spacing is too wide. Words (eg. for identifiers) loose some of their shape and look more like a stream of disjoint characters. Subtle but going back and forth between the 2 fonts, this is the first thing that jumped out. That being said, this would probably benefit code that's rich in symbol characters. All in all, I'm glad this font exists, it is beautiful. But for my own use, I will stick with my trusty PT Mono.
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  > Words (eg. for identifiers) loose some of their shape yeah this is what I noticed as well from samples and testing out on my code, same reason I'm not keen on Fira but prefer Consolas, letters are less regular and words have a different rhythm at a glance.
  - squaresmile 7y ago
    I have the same experience with Fira Mono and Consolas. Interestingly, I quite enjoy Fira Sans, setting it as my phone's main font and Chrome's sans-serif font (had to change HN's CSS to change its comment font). The "sleekness" of Fira Sans feels pleasant but for monospace font, I prefer the "fullness" of Consolas. Maybe it's because I read code slower than I read Internet text.
crazygringo 7y ago
I always applaud efforts at new typefaces, but unfortunately I feel this is a badly designed typeface that is worse for legibility, not better. Addressing their three main points in turn: > 1. Increased height for a better reading experience A high x-height is good for coding fonts, but this x-height is now too high. To my eye, this is now at the point where lowercase letters are getting harder to distinguish from uppercase letters at a glance, so instead of increasing legibility it's actually decreasing it now. There's a good reason most other coding fonts haven't gone this high. > 2. The shape of ovals approaches that of rectangular symbols. Again, this is a problem because it makes letterforms harder to distinguish. It's important that the right side of a "b" look very different from an "h"... but if you make the right side of the "b" very straight, they look more similar. The whole point of letterforms is to be easy to differentiate from each other, not to make them more similar. > 3. JetBrains Mono’s typeface forms are simple and free from unnecessary details... The easier the forms, the faster the eye perceives them and the less effort the brain needs to process them. Again, this is just factually false, or else all books would be printed in sans-serif body text instead of serif. The main reason serif fonts are used is that all their extra "details" make reading easier, not harder -- because the eye has more clues to differentiate letters. Now because of resolutions of screens, sans-serif is still sometimes a better choice on computer screens, but this makes distinctiveness of letterforms even more important, not less. For example, they choose a single-story instead of double-story lowercase "g", which is just harder for the eye to distinguish from a "q". Getting rid of the stem on a "u" also makes it less distinguishable, and harder to read. And so on. I'm genuinely confused as to how the philosophy for this typeface was developed, when it seems to go directly against basic established principles of legibility.
- jeltz 7y ago
  And they also have added details on their own in cases where it just seems to slightly harm readability, like the extreme narrowing in the "n" for example. I find their design choices strange.
  - gravitas 7y ago
    The character bugging me is the lowercase i - it looks like a little 1 with a dot on top if you can squint that hard, it's worse not better than DejaVu Sans which I use. (edit: the lowercase a is also rapidly gaining my dislike, it's all smashed up and looks weird)
jfengel 7y ago
Is there a reason why the stroke narrows where a curve joins a line (the loops of the p and g, the top of the n and the bottom of the a, etc)? The Consolas font uses a consistent stroke weight; the Fira and Source Code Pro thin the line a bit but much less. It's so narrow I feel like it might render strangely at sufficiently low resolutions; it risks breaking the connection. Presumably there's a readability reason, but I have no idea. I don't have an opinion one way or the other; I'm just curious.
- knubie 7y ago
  It’s a technique to balance the “color” of the glyph. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_color https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_color
- Philipp_n 7y ago
  It makes the oval more pronounced at small sizes like 12px.
  - jfengel 7y ago
    Makes sense. Thanks.
mtm7 7y ago
This looks really nice. I usually use SF Mono with Fira Code’s ligatures, but I’m going to try this today and see how it does. Great job on the simple license, too. I wish more fonts had a license like this.
beefhash 7y ago
Can I have only the ligatures that balance whitespace and skip the symbol merging?
- Philipp_n 7y ago
  Sorry, right now it's not implemented. You can create a feature request in https://youtrack.jetbrains.com https://youtrack.jetbrains.com or on https://github.com/JetBrains/JetBrainsMono https://github.com/JetBrains/JetBrainsMono
bluedino 7y ago
Uppercase 'G' looks very odd to me. Lowercase 'u' looks liek a 'v' at a quick glance. The height of the crossbar in the uppercase 'A' is too high. The numeric characters look big and out of place. Disclaimer: my current font of choice is Camingo Code - https://www.janfromm.de/typefaces/camingomono/camingocode/ https://www.janfromm.de/typefaces/camingomono/camingocode/
bradenb 7y ago
I've installed it and will try it out for a while. My immediate reaction is that it looks nice. Very nice in VS Code, but oddly it has some funky issues in Visual Studio 2019 (particularly with lowercase 'a') at 100% zoom and font size 11 on my monitor. Not sure if it's an aliasing or TrueType issue.
- Philipp_n 7y ago
  Sounds interesting. Can you send me the screenshot?
holtalanm 7y ago
I'll stick with DejaVu Sans Mono, thanks.
- bmn__ 7y ago
  "143 languages", says the homepage. That's an attempt to take us for a ride. JB Mono does not actually cover very much, see table below. We should stick with DejaVu Sans Mono so that multilingual text does not look like glyph salad. ---- fontforge → Element → Font properties… → Unicode Ranges Non-Unicode Glyphs 159/0 Unassigned Code Points U+0000-U+11FFFF 2/0 Basic Multilingual Plane U+0000-U+FFFF 481/61780 C0 Control Characters U+0000-U+001F 2/0 Basic Latin U+0020-U+007E 95/95 Latin-1 Supplement U+00A0-U+00FF 94/96 Latin Extended-A U+0100-U+017F 128/128 Latin Extended-B U+0180-U+024F 6/208 Spacing Modifier Letters U+02B0-U+02FF 9/80 Greek and Coptic U+0370-U+03FF 2/135 Cyrillic U+0400-U+04FF 94/256 Latin Extended Additional U+1E00-U+1EFF 6/256 General Punctuation U+2000-U+206F 16/111 Superscripts and Subscripts U+2070-U+209F 7/42 Currency Symbols U+20A0-U+20CF 1/32 Letterlike Symbols U+2100-U+214F 5/80 Mathematical Operators U+2200-U+22FF 14/256 Geometric Shapes U+25A0-U+25FF 1/96 Alphabetic Presentation Forms U+FB00-U+FB4F 2/58 Latin Ligatures U+FB00-U+FB06 2/7
bitwize 7y ago
Nice try, JetBrains, but it will take more than that to tear me away from the Atari ST 8x16 system font.
rbanffy 7y ago
I love the spacing-related ligatures. Having said that, I have mostly the same complains @crazygringo has. I'll continue to use my old 3270 font. It's clean and easy to read and, best of all, reminds me of a more civilized age.
tomerbd 7y ago
A few weeks ago I was looking for some good font for my terminal and figured out my intellij looks good so why dont i use the font I use in java intellij in terminal so - installed intellij mono on terminal and found it to be great, interesting to see they now opensource it and the coincidence ! :) I really like it both for coding and for terminal.
chimen 7y ago
Courier 10 Pitch - that's the best font for me. I activated this one and it seems like letters are not "aligned" correctly. I'm sure it's just a feeling but I can;t move away from Courier it seems
mangatmodi 7y ago
I don't know if it is my habit or what, but the font is wider and bolder than what I had before - Victor Mono.
moralsupply 7y ago
I still prefer mplus 2m
pbowyer 7y ago
Can I control which weight is used in JetBrains IDEs for "bold" text? It looks to be using the bold font weight, when I'd prefer to use medium.
- nolok 7y ago
  For multi-weight font they shows up as different font in the list. Fire Code light, Fire Code medium, ...
  - pbowyer 7y ago
    They do in Settings > Editor > Font, but AFAICT I can't control more than the main editor font. For example: Settings > Editor > Code Style > Style Sheets > CSS <-- no way to control the font weight used for bold-rendered property values
alexeiz 7y ago
Regarding fonts, there is no single monospace font that fits the bill everywhere. A font may render beautifully or look completely unacceptable depending on a variety of factors. I personally prefer the following fonts: * Linux, normal dpi: Hasklig in editors (Emacs, Atom), Iosevka in terminal * Linux, hidpi: Input in editors and terminal * Windows, hidpi: Input in console, Fira Code in Atom I tried the JetBrains Mono font and it doesn't look like it's an improvement in any of my environments.
asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
I kinda like it! Definitely gonna try it out for a few days and see how we go. Thanks for putting this out there.
moogly 7y ago
Sorry, JetBrains, but I can't stand ligatures in coding fonts.
otterpro 7y ago
For some reason, it isn't registered as a mono-spaced font on Windows 10 when I installed it. Thus some editors as well as CMD and powershell can't even open the font. However, I can use this font from MS Word.
davalapar 7y ago
Hmmm I got bad eyes that makes me hate consolas, looks like a good contender to operator mono, will give this one a shot.
iliyangermanov 7y ago
That's cool! Gotta try it. Thanks for sharing :)
ubercow13 7y ago
In their 'comparison' with Consolas, they say Consolas is wider but the image clearly shows that Consolas is narrower than their font at 13pt...
rbanffy 7y ago
Airbus developed a font to be used in their avionics displays called B612. I don't find the results particularly pleasing, but the intended use (cockpit instrumentation) is not part of my day-to-day life. https://b612-font.com/ https://b612-font.com/
michaelmcdonald 7y ago
Looks like their site is having some issues
tracker1 7y ago
Need to check it out, I think my only concern that may be missing or il-formed would be box and line drawing characters... So many fixed-width fonts get this wrong... Inconsolata, for example has taken a number of revisions to support these characters properly. I will say, I do like a few of the changes, but not sure if I'll be switching from Inconsolata/Consolas any time soon.
- raphlinus 7y ago
  Thanks! I recently rewrote the box drawing character generation (in Rust) to support variable fonts, so outputs a very wide range of widths and weights.
pdeva1 7y ago
on the comparison with Consolas section, it says consolas is wider than JBMono, and JBMono is taller. However, the lines of code in the example run longer in the JBMono version than Consolas. Why is that? is the comparison flawed?
w3bshark 7y ago
Ok I tried out the font. It’s actually more difficult to read than Fira Code. YMMV. To me, everything is too thick and crammed together compared to Fira. It just feels like the font wasn't designed with enough letter spacing. I think you can manually control this in IntelliJ products, but the default spacing seems too crammed.
alexk7 7y ago
I prefer to use size 10 on my coding font. Just tried it in Visual Studio and it looks really bad with uneven lines, mostly on upper case letters.
Syzygies 7y ago
To install in VS Code, one edits Settings - Commonly Used - Editor: Font Family. It would appear that one needs the Font Family name, which one can guess. To be sure in all cases, I made a MacOS alias: alias fonts="system_profiler SPFontsDataType | grep 'Family:' | perl -pe 's|^.*Family: ||' | sort -u" However, how does one select weights, such as defaulting to JetBrains Mono Medium It turns out that one can enter a raw font file name in place of the family, such as JetBrainsMono-Medium However, any formatting that selects a different style, such as italics, will default to the family. So for example, italic comments are rendered for me in regular not medium weight. I'm fine with this, but it's a quirk that can only be fixed by spelunking into the individual syntax highlighting files.
eric_cc 7y ago
I spent more time than I'd like to admit reviewing fonts for legibility and aesthetics. So if you're looking for a new favorite font, hope this helps: 1. IBM Plex Mono 2. Office Code Pro 3. Fira Code 4. Inconsolata 5. PT Mono 6. SF Mono 7. Input Mono 8. Hack 9. DejaVu Sans Mono - Bront 10. Anonymous Pro
- Ayesh 7y ago
  It certainly does. Thank you.
MikeTheGreat 7y ago
Serious question: Is it possible to turn ligatures on, but deactivate them for only some of the combinations? Specifically, I want to see =, ==, and === 'as written', meaning 1, 2, or 3 separate characters. Pretty much the rest of them (like <=, or even !=) seem like they're either nice immediately or else I could get used to them. I'd love to know if this is possible at all, possible for some editors / fonts / OS's, etc, or just a non-starter of an idea.
- Ayesh 7y ago
  I don't think it's possible from IDE configuration: there is only a single toggle for ligatures. The font is open source - may be you can build you own without the ligatures you don't need?
nojvek 7y ago
Set as default code on VSCode for an hour and try to code in JetBrains Mono. I kind of found it to hard to read. Reverted back to "Monaco". Really hard to beat Monaco (I'm probably biased, my eyes and brains are very used to it).
aluenakyla 7y ago
This opinion seems to buck the trend here but I really like this a lot. I've just now dropped it in as a replacement font to what I was using before for sharing code snippets on my personal blog (was just using monospace before) and for me it's a huge improvement in both readability and just overall looks. The only thing I've noticed is that parentheses look a little weird with this font. They are a little too squared off, particularly noticeable in cases where they are used immediately together like this ().
paulie_a 7y ago
Why do developers get all giddy about a new type face for their editor. Is there something lacking in the millions that already exist? Does it make you produce less bugs, better code? I don't get it
mstdokumaci 7y ago
supports 143 languages but not turkish, because adding the letter "ı" must be super hard.
thiht 7y ago
The slide comparison with Consolas might not be a good idea, Consolas looks much easier on the eye, and it happens to be my all-time favorite monospace font. Some ligatures are also really weird and look like a case of "we could do it so we did it". ===, ~@, #_(, etc. are highly unreadable and unnecesary. Spacing ligatures are great though.
myfonj 7y ago
I'm quite surprised no serious "programming font" to this days didn't come with something improving camelCase readability: making ligature for each lowerUPPER combination with slightly wider center gap and narrower first character (so that sum was still in monospace grid) would FMPoW tremendously boost readability and would be remedy for camelCase haters. I've searched for it lately and the only what resembled this was interesting POC of "mixed" (semi-proportional monospaced) font [1], but with simple kerning pairs, not ligatures, but with extra trickery for "uppercase prefixes" (`_UUUl... `→`_UU·Ul...`). I wonder if in-word camelcase boundaries would be doable as well, so that `decodeURIComponent` would be rendered as `decode·URI·Component`. [1] https://twitter.com/Tricertops/status/951551714078941185 https://twitter.com/Tricertops/status/951551714078941185
- runxel 7y ago
  > I wonder if in-word camelcase boundaries would be doable as well Theoretically yes. But in practice most possibly no. OpenType tables just feature fixed length strings matching. It can't match to more powerful regular expressions. You would need an infinite number of OT rules. [0] If you'd have a well defined set, maybe it could work, but it would still be overwhelming fast. [0] http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net/gposgsub.html http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net/gposgsub.html
ryoppippi 7y ago
I applied a patch for powerline! If you want this, use it! https://github.com/ryoppippi/JetBrainsMono https://github.com/ryoppippi/JetBrainsMono
gabrielbauman 7y ago
As a Fira Code user, I like the look of JetBrains Mono - but I'll wait for a "light" weight.

506 points by nizmow 7y ago

I've never understood the obsession and bikeshedding over fonts. I can appreciate that there are people who spend a huge amount of time agonizing over the details and tradeoffs making these things, but... Arial, Times New Roman and Consolas are more than good enough for my purposes.

royjacobs 7y ago
This could be an indication that you are not the target audience.

nkrisc 7y ago

I was disappointed that despite presenting the cookie banner as if it were a terminal, the options did not accept keyboard input [Y]es, I agree [N]o, thanks Ok on topic: I'm never sure what to think of these "developer" fonts that make use of ligatures for combinations like ==, >=, ->, =>, etc. On one hand they do look really nice, but I always can't help but feel it would actually make things just a little bit harder to scan and parse quickly. I do find it a very pleasing font to read, however.

nizmow 7y ago
I agree about ligatures. I use them whenever I can because they look cool, but sometimes I think it actually is to my detriment. For example, if I mistakenly type `->` it looks very similar to a ligatured `-->`.
blackhaz 7y ago
Anything printed or displayed in that font will confuse people unfamiliar with that font's ligature system as well. I say thee nay!
Dirlewanger 7y ago
Yup, also don't like ligatures. They're a solution looking for a problem. Will however try this font when it drops in IDE updates.
ebg13 7y ago
Same. Any font that claims to be for programming but includes ligatures gets a "no thanks" from me accompanied by a bit of sadness because they often mar otherwise nicely designed typefaces.
- IAmEveryone 7y ago
  You really don’t have to use the ligatures, do you?
  - ScottFree 7y ago
    I don't know about other programs, but iTerm has a checkbox option to enable/disable ligatures.
    - ShowMeWhatUGot 7y ago
      So does JetBrains IDE's and VS Code. I don't know of any program that forces you to use ligatures just because the typeface supports it.
      - vblinden 7y ago
        Visual Studio (the full blown IDE)
        evansj 7y ago
        Add to settings.json: "editor.fontLigatures": false (Edit: sorry, just realised you were talking about the full blown Visual Studio, not VSCode)
  - dnadler 7y ago
    You don't; there's a checkbox to toggle them, and it defaults to 'off'.
- Joeri 7y ago
  For me it is the reverse, I only want ligatures now and feel a programming font isn’t done until it supports them.
lelf 7y ago
Agree about ligatures too. Many of those are pretty unpleasing to read (AKA typographically wrong), e. g. /=.
SloopJon 7y ago
Emacs has a minor mode (prettify-symbols-mode, I think) that makes substitutions like these. I tried it for a couple of months, but decided that it wasn't for me.
- alpaca128 7y ago
  I've recently tried Emacs for a few weeks and prettify-symbols-mode doesn't look nearly as good in my opinion, as the scale and style of the symbols isn't consistent with the font. Also I never got any symbol out of it in any situation except an arrow and lambda. I'd much prefer if Emacs just supported actual ligatures.
- weavie 7y ago
  It is possible to take this too far.. https://imgur.com/a/5NP6FWx https://imgur.com/a/5NP6FWx But it did keep me entertained for a bit.
vishwajeetv 7y ago
It accepts keyboard input, but you have to click on the terminal first.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  Then shame on them for not focusing it by default.
  - drchickensalad 7y ago
    I'll be honest I can imagine it's on risky legal ground. A stray y key hit when doing anything on the page accepts the agreement? For all their faults, all other implementations are much more explicit and resilient than this, as they require a targeted click.
    - GordonS 7y ago
      > they require a targeted click As opposed to a targeted key press? Seriously, what's the difference? It's very common for GUIs, and even TUIs, to accept key presses for actions
  - urbanjunkie 7y ago
    Get over yourself you hysterical little child.
jddj 7y ago
With a good deal of skepticism, I switched the environment where I do about half of my work to a font with ligatures some time ago. Just to try it out for a while. I happily forgot that I had done it as a trial, and upon reading this headline caught myself hoping that there would be ligatures. I actually find that it provides an almost haptic feedback when going between things like =, == and ===, and I think I miss it just a little when I don't have it. As for the font itself, I like it but slightly prefer the style of Fira Code.
- tracker1 7y ago
  For some reason, I just don't like the spacing in Fira Code... I really like Inconsolata/Consolas myself... I've tried both, but it just feels off to me. Aside: Hopefully this font has box and line art characters and they align properly... this is a huge short coming in a number of fixed-width fonts that should be rectified.
- veidr 7y ago
  Wow, I didn't think I wanted ligatures and so I never turned them on. But based on your comment, I just tried it and I found that I love it! The little visual blip! when the characters merge does in fact provide a nice little feedback that I've typed the right thing. And also the two-character => arrow in fat-arrow functions always kind of bugged me a little bit and it is nice to have it condensed to a single visual entity. Woo hoo! I will leave ligatures on from now on.
scoutt 7y ago
I've just installed this font and tested it with VS Code, and I must say that it is a very nice font. Code is clear and easy to read (C/C++ development). I think I'll keep it for a while. Regarding ligatures, I agree. I could live with the pointer arrow ligature, that's fine and looks nice, but not with the crossed '=' (that is "!=") or the symbol for >=. Call it ageing, but for the moment it stops my code reading flow. So "editor.fontLigatures": false
- Klathmon 7y ago
  This is why I love how configurable editors are now days. I absolutely adore ligatures in my programming fonts. I've been using FiraCode for at least a year or 2 now, and while i'll be the first to admit that the reason I enabled ligatures was because they looked cool, now I really miss them when they aren't there.
  - lokedhs 7y ago
    I'd much rather see languages take advantage of characters outside of ASCII. There are already symbols such as ⇒ which could be used by a language. This is a nice feature of APL, and the derivatives such as J which use plain ASCII are much less nice to work with.
    - boutad 7y ago
      That seems like it would be difficult to type.
      - necovek 7y ago
        What's stopping editors to provide shortcuts akin to ligatures? Eg. typing "=>" would make use of the "follows" sign.
        Piskvorrr 7y ago
        And now you can only type code in the set of blessed editors and correctly displaying fonts. "Make code pretty" should be a matter of presentation, not actual source code. To use your example, typing "=>" could display the "follows" sign, but the string representation should not depend on exotic characters like "ř", "⸙", or "" (is that a box symbol, or "symbol not found in current font"? Oh wait, the HTML input field ate it! See?!).
Grumbledour 7y ago
I do love the ligatures in Fira Code. It always makes me happy to see the nice looking <=, >=, !=, !== or ->. I am not so sure about these, though. Maybe a tad to much/to special in some cases? Somehow they don't pop for me the same way.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  Some of them are a little ambiguous to me. For example, the ligature for #{ looks like it could be #={. I honestly couldn't tell until I selected the text. Some of them are nice, however. Specifically the ones that just tighten up the spacing and make small adjustments. For example, most of the ones that involve a colon I think are an improvement, but still distinct and unambiguous.
- redisman 7y ago
  Also === in JS and TS turning into three horizontal lines is really nice for my brain (even though lint catches it). Fira coda retina is still my go-to font, this one doesn't look quite as legible.
Syzygies 7y ago
Comment characters, and compound operators without ligatures, are ground glass in my eyes. The first thing I checked for here was ligatures; this font would not have gotten five seconds of my time otherwise. If one doesn't want ligatures, one turns them off. No one should design a programming font in 2020 without ligatures, just like no one should design a programming language in 2020 without a language server to handle editor services. In a language like Haskell with many compound operators, the code just looks stupid and irritating without ligatures. I may be at one extreme here, for I absolutely loathe comment characters. I've programmed preprocessors for each language that I use, with defaults that flush left is a comment (to be appropriately syntax colored, and with a convention for blocks that include indentation) and indented is code.
dorian-graph 7y ago
I've been using ligatures (Fira) for about 4 months now and love it.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

prashnts 7y ago

Great to see that they’ve attributed Nikita Prokopov, the creator of FiraCode. While not the first, he expanded the ligatures in Hack, and Hasklig fonts and Jetbrains eventually bundled Firacode in their products. Quite a nice course of open source development over the years (I have been following the updates since ~2016).

iLemming 7y ago
You know that @tonsky works for them now, right?
- prashnts 7y ago
  Nope, didn’t. Ah well, good for him regardless.

Ayesh 7y ago

We should take a lesson from the FAQ about license. It is the simplest yet most useful one I have seen! -- May I install JetBrains Mono on my system and use it in any code editor? -> YES. May I make and print a poster with JetBrains Mono? -> YES. May I use JetBrains Mono in my logotype? -> YES. May I use JetBrains Mono on my website? -> YES. May I use JetBrains Mono in my applications? -> YES. May I design my own font based on JetBrains Mono? -> YES. In this case, you need to indicate that it is based on JetBrains Mono. --- Font licensing is not what we developers are used to, but they have done a fine job pointing this out in simple terms.

IAmEveryone 7y ago
That’s just a summary of the license, which is Apache 2.0, a software license.
- theandrewbailey 7y ago
  Usually, fonts are licensed under SIL.[0] Maybe Jetbrains feel that their target audience is more familiar with Apache licenses? [0] https://scripts.sil.org/ofl https://scripts.sil.org/ofl
RobertRoberts 7y ago
IANAL - I am pretty certain you can do most of those things with all fonts regardless of license. Copyrights on fonts is almost non-existent. The only thing copyrightable is the actual "code" used in the font. (maybe delivering their files on a website is an issue?) This is based on research I did years ago when dealing with a copyright legal case where I worked. The summation is that you can't copyright the alphabet, so fonts aren't copyrightable. The only one I completely disagree with is the last one though. Requiring attribution for something not copyrightable is kinda silly.
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  That's interesting. Because most fonts are protected by a copyright-based license, that they don't seem to have any trouble enforcing. How extensive was your research?

graycrow 7y ago

It is an odd decision not to include Ukrainian in the list of supported languages, despite the fact that the font has all the necessary letters.

ivanche 7y ago
Also, Croatian is included twice.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
topka 7y ago
Ukrainian and a couple of other languages were missed on the list. It's a known issue we're updating on the site right now. Thanks!
Philipp_n 7y ago
The list a bit outdated. Will upload correct one soon.

d1egoaz 7y ago

nice font and oss, however I still prefer Iosevka SS04

vz8 7y ago
Agreed. After Iosevka, other fonts have felt ... unwieldy. Link for reference: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka Re: "SS04" d1egoaz is referencing Stylistic Set 04, illustrated here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/be5invis/Iosevka/master/images/stylesets.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/be5invis/Iosevka/master/im... In addition to the original version of the font above, there is a patched version with powerline icons (and much more) built in: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/tree/master/patched-fonts/Iosevka https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/tree/master/patched-... which is very handy for emacs/vim modelines.
- cjbprime 7y ago
  I've even switched to using the proportional Iosevka Aile for programming, here's someone else's screenshot from the last time it was mentioned on HN: https://i.imgur.com/LdzBmpx.png https://i.imgur.com/LdzBmpx.png
- indemnity 7y ago
  For me, it's the fact that I can create a custom build of Iosevka with preferred weights that look good in the different font rendering systems: Native macOS, Electron (VS Code), Java (IntelliJ). All need different weights to end up looking about the same on the same system. And then being able to turn on/off ligatures, tweak some glyphs. It's hard to give that up.

vishwajeetv 7y ago

Not sure if this is good. They have increased the character height for readability, although I think this will cause more confusion and decrease readability. Adobe's Source code pro has worked for me very well.

dtertman 7y ago

Thanks, I hate it. My most recent update of IntelliJ turned this font on by default and I had to spend an hour trying to figure out what the font used to be. Mono looked squished to me - the intentional favoring of length over width made the whole editor look like I had an aspect ratio problem on my monitor. I appreciate trying to push the envelope and improve ergonomics, but I wish this would have been opt-in for upgraders.

dubcanada 7y ago
Mine didn't? What update version did you update to that turned this on by default?
- dtertman 7y ago
  Ultimate 2019.3 on Mac
  - dubcanada 7y ago
    I have the same version, and when I updated it stayed with Fira Code as the default as per my color schema.
    - dtertman 7y ago
      Yeah, that's the rub it seems - if you picked a default, you kept your default. If you had the old JetBrains default, you now got the new JetBrains default.
ncmncm 7y ago
What did it used to be? You could have taken the opportunity to switch to Inconsolata.
- dtertman 7y ago
  I picked "Monospaced" - I couldn't find any clear documentation of what it was, and that looked OK.

AlanYx 7y ago

It looks like this has the largest x-height of any typeface meant for developers (larger than even Fira Code). While there is research suggesting a large x-height increases readability, I'm wondering whether this doesn't push the x-height just a little too far. CamelCase words no longer stand out visually very easily -- I'm not sure how I feel about that.

jaywalk 7y ago
I do find it fairly hard to read. The letters are also too wide in my opinion.
raihansaputra 7y ago
Interesting point. Currently trying it out, and the x-height thing matters, similar to another feedback in this thread that says words become disjointed glyphs instead of a "shape". I'll keep this for the moment. Looks much cleaner than Fira Code, but will have to see on the readability side. Another point: not only they have increased the x-height, they also reduced the descender-height (for j,q,p,y) by a lot. I have trouble with function definitions such as post/put/patch or even keywords as response/reject.
- raihansaputra 7y ago
  If any of you are keeping score or reading through this now, I currently use Input as my main font [0]. Non-monospace is certainly unorthodox, but they do have monospace fonts anyway (and I have to use it with the vscode internal terminal). Input plays much better with lower dpi (90-112) screens with small font sizes (12px font size with -1 zoom on vscode). It looks good too on my Retina screen. [0]: https://input.fontbureau.com/info/ https://input.fontbureau.com/info/
crazypython 7y ago
Menlo has a similar size.

ar-nelson 7y ago

I like it, this might finally be the font that gets me to drop Fira Code. It's missing Powerline symbols, though, which is a strange omission for a developer font in 2020.

lemagedurage 7y ago
Ah yeah, that's a shame. I can't imagine it will take long before someone creates that though.
hylaride 7y ago
This. Makes it hard for me to use it for VIM as my terminal needs Powerline. It's otherwise a very nice font.
- uncletaco 7y ago
  I think it makes sense that they didn't take powerline into account because I'm assuming this font will become the default for jetbrains editors. Their solution to your wanting to use this font in vim is probably "use vim in our editor instead..."
prashnts 7y ago
You could grab a patched copy here: https://www.nerdfonts.com/ https://www.nerdfonts.com/ Aside, I wish some ligature magic for box drawing characters existed. Or at least don’t skip those glyphs, which is unfortunately the case with many monospace fonts.
- ar-nelson 7y ago
  NerdFonts doesn't have it yet, but I managed to patch it myself using their tool[1]. Seems to have worked without any issues. [1]: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts#option-8-patch-your-own-font https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts#option-8-patch-your-...

memco 7y ago

Nice font. I think it’s a bit sad that the only difference between zero and the letter O is the center dot: usually other fonts make the O slightly more round. This one is squarish. The site design is nice but I found it a bit odd that they didn’t include many of the similar character like O, 0, 1, l, I. That is one of the first things I look for and one of the primary reasons I would choose a new font.

xixixao 7y ago
They do include both sets (0, o and 1, l, I). That said I absolutely agree that this is far from the best approach to 0 and o.
- memco 7y ago
  Sorry I worded my comment poorly. I meant that the code examples at the top don’t seem to prioritize showing those distinctions. If you scroll down they have a separate section but I think it would be nice to showcase all the features on the first samples so that you can see right away how it looks.
ollien 7y ago
I absolutely cannot stand dotted zeroes. I really wish it were slashed.

athenot 7y ago

This is a great-looking font, very well put together and a lot of thought put in to make it great for code. That being said, fonts are very personal. I compared it to PT Mono (Public Type, another open-source font) and have these observations: - Ligatures in JB are beautiful. I'm still undecided whether I like them in my code but the aesthetic value is pleasing. - Weight of JB Regular is heavier than PT. - Italics are well designed. - Character spacing is too wide. Words (eg. for identifiers) loose some of their shape and look more like a stream of disjoint characters. Subtle but going back and forth between the 2 fonts, this is the first thing that jumped out. That being said, this would probably benefit code that's rich in symbol characters. All in all, I'm glad this font exists, it is beautiful. But for my own use, I will stick with my trusty PT Mono.

LoSboccacc 7y ago
> Words (eg. for identifiers) loose some of their shape yeah this is what I noticed as well from samples and testing out on my code, same reason I'm not keen on Fira but prefer Consolas, letters are less regular and words have a different rhythm at a glance.
- squaresmile 7y ago
  I have the same experience with Fira Mono and Consolas. Interestingly, I quite enjoy Fira Sans, setting it as my phone's main font and Chrome's sans-serif font (had to change HN's CSS to change its comment font). The "sleekness" of Fira Sans feels pleasant but for monospace font, I prefer the "fullness" of Consolas. Maybe it's because I read code slower than I read Internet text.

crazygringo 7y ago

I always applaud efforts at new typefaces, but unfortunately I feel this is a badly designed typeface that is worse for legibility, not better. Addressing their three main points in turn: > 1. Increased height for a better reading experience A high x-height is good for coding fonts, but this x-height is now too high. To my eye, this is now at the point where lowercase letters are getting harder to distinguish from uppercase letters at a glance, so instead of increasing legibility it's actually decreasing it now. There's a good reason most other coding fonts haven't gone this high. > 2. The shape of ovals approaches that of rectangular symbols. Again, this is a problem because it makes letterforms harder to distinguish. It's important that the right side of a "b" look very different from an "h"... but if you make the right side of the "b" very straight, they look more similar. The whole point of letterforms is to be easy to differentiate from each other, not to make them more similar. > 3. JetBrains Mono’s typeface forms are simple and free from unnecessary details... The easier the forms, the faster the eye perceives them and the less effort the brain needs to process them. Again, this is just factually false, or else all books would be printed in sans-serif body text instead of serif. The main reason serif fonts are used is that all their extra "details" make reading easier, not harder -- because the eye has more clues to differentiate letters. Now because of resolutions of screens, sans-serif is still sometimes a better choice on computer screens, but this makes distinctiveness of letterforms even more important, not less. For example, they choose a single-story instead of double-story lowercase "g", which is just harder for the eye to distinguish from a "q". Getting rid of the stem on a "u" also makes it less distinguishable, and harder to read. And so on. I'm genuinely confused as to how the philosophy for this typeface was developed, when it seems to go directly against basic established principles of legibility.

jeltz 7y ago
And they also have added details on their own in cases where it just seems to slightly harm readability, like the extreme narrowing in the "n" for example. I find their design choices strange.
- gravitas 7y ago
  The character bugging me is the lowercase i - it looks like a little 1 with a dot on top if you can squint that hard, it's worse not better than DejaVu Sans which I use. (edit: the lowercase a is also rapidly gaining my dislike, it's all smashed up and looks weird)

jfengel 7y ago

Is there a reason why the stroke narrows where a curve joins a line (the loops of the p and g, the top of the n and the bottom of the a, etc)? The Consolas font uses a consistent stroke weight; the Fira and Source Code Pro thin the line a bit but much less. It's so narrow I feel like it might render strangely at sufficiently low resolutions; it risks breaking the connection. Presumably there's a readability reason, but I have no idea. I don't have an opinion one way or the other; I'm just curious.

knubie 7y ago
It’s a technique to balance the “color” of the glyph. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_color https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_color
Philipp_n 7y ago
It makes the oval more pronounced at small sizes like 12px.
- jfengel 7y ago
  Makes sense. Thanks.

mtm7 7y ago

This looks really nice. I usually use SF Mono with Fira Code’s ligatures, but I’m going to try this today and see how it does. Great job on the simple license, too. I wish more fonts had a license like this.

beefhash 7y ago

Can I have only the ligatures that balance whitespace and skip the symbol merging?

Philipp_n 7y ago
Sorry, right now it's not implemented. You can create a feature request in https://youtrack.jetbrains.com https://youtrack.jetbrains.com or on https://github.com/JetBrains/JetBrainsMono https://github.com/JetBrains/JetBrainsMono

bluedino 7y ago

Uppercase 'G' looks very odd to me. Lowercase 'u' looks liek a 'v' at a quick glance. The height of the crossbar in the uppercase 'A' is too high. The numeric characters look big and out of place. Disclaimer: my current font of choice is Camingo Code - https://www.janfromm.de/typefaces/camingomono/camingocode/ https://www.janfromm.de/typefaces/camingomono/camingocode/

bradenb 7y ago

I've installed it and will try it out for a while. My immediate reaction is that it looks nice. Very nice in VS Code, but oddly it has some funky issues in Visual Studio 2019 (particularly with lowercase 'a') at 100% zoom and font size 11 on my monitor. Not sure if it's an aliasing or TrueType issue.

Philipp_n 7y ago
Sounds interesting. Can you send me the screenshot?

holtalanm 7y ago

I'll stick with DejaVu Sans Mono, thanks.

bmn__ 7y ago
"143 languages", says the homepage. That's an attempt to take us for a ride. JB Mono does not actually cover very much, see table below. We should stick with DejaVu Sans Mono so that multilingual text does not look like glyph salad. ---- fontforge → Element → Font properties… → Unicode Ranges Non-Unicode Glyphs 159/0 Unassigned Code Points U+0000-U+11FFFF 2/0 Basic Multilingual Plane U+0000-U+FFFF 481/61780 C0 Control Characters U+0000-U+001F 2/0 Basic Latin U+0020-U+007E 95/95 Latin-1 Supplement U+00A0-U+00FF 94/96 Latin Extended-A U+0100-U+017F 128/128 Latin Extended-B U+0180-U+024F 6/208 Spacing Modifier Letters U+02B0-U+02FF 9/80 Greek and Coptic U+0370-U+03FF 2/135 Cyrillic U+0400-U+04FF 94/256 Latin Extended Additional U+1E00-U+1EFF 6/256 General Punctuation U+2000-U+206F 16/111 Superscripts and Subscripts U+2070-U+209F 7/42 Currency Symbols U+20A0-U+20CF 1/32 Letterlike Symbols U+2100-U+214F 5/80 Mathematical Operators U+2200-U+22FF 14/256 Geometric Shapes U+25A0-U+25FF 1/96 Alphabetic Presentation Forms U+FB00-U+FB4F 2/58 Latin Ligatures U+FB00-U+FB06 2/7

bitwize 7y ago

Nice try, JetBrains, but it will take more than that to tear me away from the Atari ST 8x16 system font.

rbanffy 7y ago

I love the spacing-related ligatures. Having said that, I have mostly the same complains @crazygringo has. I'll continue to use my old 3270 font. It's clean and easy to read and, best of all, reminds me of a more civilized age.

tomerbd 7y ago

A few weeks ago I was looking for some good font for my terminal and figured out my intellij looks good so why dont i use the font I use in java intellij in terminal so - installed intellij mono on terminal and found it to be great, interesting to see they now opensource it and the coincidence ! :) I really like it both for coding and for terminal.

chimen 7y ago

Courier 10 Pitch - that's the best font for me. I activated this one and it seems like letters are not "aligned" correctly. I'm sure it's just a feeling but I can;t move away from Courier it seems

mangatmodi 7y ago

I don't know if it is my habit or what, but the font is wider and bolder than what I had before - Victor Mono.

moralsupply 7y ago

I still prefer mplus 2m

pbowyer 7y ago

Can I control which weight is used in JetBrains IDEs for "bold" text? It looks to be using the bold font weight, when I'd prefer to use medium.

nolok 7y ago
For multi-weight font they shows up as different font in the list. Fire Code light, Fire Code medium, ...
- pbowyer 7y ago
  They do in Settings > Editor > Font, but AFAICT I can't control more than the main editor font. For example: Settings > Editor > Code Style > Style Sheets > CSS <-- no way to control the font weight used for bold-rendered property values

alexeiz 7y ago

Regarding fonts, there is no single monospace font that fits the bill everywhere. A font may render beautifully or look completely unacceptable depending on a variety of factors. I personally prefer the following fonts: * Linux, normal dpi: Hasklig in editors (Emacs, Atom), Iosevka in terminal * Linux, hidpi: Input in editors and terminal * Windows, hidpi: Input in console, Fira Code in Atom I tried the JetBrains Mono font and it doesn't look like it's an improvement in any of my environments.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago

I kinda like it! Definitely gonna try it out for a few days and see how we go. Thanks for putting this out there.

moogly 7y ago

Sorry, JetBrains, but I can't stand ligatures in coding fonts.

otterpro 7y ago

For some reason, it isn't registered as a mono-spaced font on Windows 10 when I installed it. Thus some editors as well as CMD and powershell can't even open the font. However, I can use this font from MS Word.

davalapar 7y ago

Hmmm I got bad eyes that makes me hate consolas, looks like a good contender to operator mono, will give this one a shot.

iliyangermanov 7y ago

That's cool! Gotta try it. Thanks for sharing :)

ubercow13 7y ago

In their 'comparison' with Consolas, they say Consolas is wider but the image clearly shows that Consolas is narrower than their font at 13pt...

rbanffy 7y ago

Airbus developed a font to be used in their avionics displays called B612. I don't find the results particularly pleasing, but the intended use (cockpit instrumentation) is not part of my day-to-day life. https://b612-font.com/ https://b612-font.com/

michaelmcdonald 7y ago

Looks like their site is having some issues

tracker1 7y ago

Need to check it out, I think my only concern that may be missing or il-formed would be box and line drawing characters... So many fixed-width fonts get this wrong... Inconsolata, for example has taken a number of revisions to support these characters properly. I will say, I do like a few of the changes, but not sure if I'll be switching from Inconsolata/Consolas any time soon.

raphlinus 7y ago
Thanks! I recently rewrote the box drawing character generation (in Rust) to support variable fonts, so outputs a very wide range of widths and weights.

pdeva1 7y ago

on the comparison with Consolas section, it says consolas is wider than JBMono, and JBMono is taller. However, the lines of code in the example run longer in the JBMono version than Consolas. Why is that? is the comparison flawed?

w3bshark 7y ago

Ok I tried out the font. It’s actually more difficult to read than Fira Code. YMMV. To me, everything is too thick and crammed together compared to Fira. It just feels like the font wasn't designed with enough letter spacing. I think you can manually control this in IntelliJ products, but the default spacing seems too crammed.

alexk7 7y ago

I prefer to use size 10 on my coding font. Just tried it in Visual Studio and it looks really bad with uneven lines, mostly on upper case letters.

Syzygies 7y ago

To install in VS Code, one edits Settings - Commonly Used - Editor: Font Family. It would appear that one needs the Font Family name, which one can guess. To be sure in all cases, I made a MacOS alias: alias fonts="system_profiler SPFontsDataType | grep 'Family:' | perl -pe 's|^.*Family: ||' | sort -u" However, how does one select weights, such as defaulting to JetBrains Mono Medium It turns out that one can enter a raw font file name in place of the family, such as JetBrainsMono-Medium However, any formatting that selects a different style, such as italics, will default to the family. So for example, italic comments are rendered for me in regular not medium weight. I'm fine with this, but it's a quirk that can only be fixed by spelunking into the individual syntax highlighting files.

eric_cc 7y ago

I spent more time than I'd like to admit reviewing fonts for legibility and aesthetics. So if you're looking for a new favorite font, hope this helps: 1. IBM Plex Mono 2. Office Code Pro 3. Fira Code 4. Inconsolata 5. PT Mono 6. SF Mono 7. Input Mono 8. Hack 9. DejaVu Sans Mono - Bront 10. Anonymous Pro

Ayesh 7y ago
It certainly does. Thank you.

MikeTheGreat 7y ago

Serious question: Is it possible to turn ligatures on, but deactivate them for only some of the combinations? Specifically, I want to see =, ==, and === 'as written', meaning 1, 2, or 3 separate characters. Pretty much the rest of them (like <=, or even !=) seem like they're either nice immediately or else I could get used to them. I'd love to know if this is possible at all, possible for some editors / fonts / OS's, etc, or just a non-starter of an idea.

Ayesh 7y ago
I don't think it's possible from IDE configuration: there is only a single toggle for ligatures. The font is open source - may be you can build you own without the ligatures you don't need?

nojvek 7y ago

Set as default code on VSCode for an hour and try to code in JetBrains Mono. I kind of found it to hard to read. Reverted back to "Monaco". Really hard to beat Monaco (I'm probably biased, my eyes and brains are very used to it).

aluenakyla 7y ago

This opinion seems to buck the trend here but I really like this a lot. I've just now dropped it in as a replacement font to what I was using before for sharing code snippets on my personal blog (was just using monospace before) and for me it's a huge improvement in both readability and just overall looks. The only thing I've noticed is that parentheses look a little weird with this font. They are a little too squared off, particularly noticeable in cases where they are used immediately together like this ().

paulie_a 7y ago

Why do developers get all giddy about a new type face for their editor. Is there something lacking in the millions that already exist? Does it make you produce less bugs, better code? I don't get it

mstdokumaci 7y ago

supports 143 languages but not turkish, because adding the letter "ı" must be super hard.

thiht 7y ago

The slide comparison with Consolas might not be a good idea, Consolas looks much easier on the eye, and it happens to be my all-time favorite monospace font. Some ligatures are also really weird and look like a case of "we could do it so we did it". ===, ~@, #_(, etc. are highly unreadable and unnecesary. Spacing ligatures are great though.

myfonj 7y ago

I'm quite surprised no serious "programming font" to this days didn't come with something improving camelCase readability: making ligature for each lowerUPPER combination with slightly wider center gap and narrower first character (so that sum was still in monospace grid) would FMPoW tremendously boost readability and would be remedy for camelCase haters. I've searched for it lately and the only what resembled this was interesting POC of "mixed" (semi-proportional monospaced) font [1], but with simple kerning pairs, not ligatures, but with extra trickery for "uppercase prefixes" (`_UUUl... `→`_UU·Ul...`). I wonder if in-word camelcase boundaries would be doable as well, so that `decodeURIComponent` would be rendered as `decode·URI·Component`. [1] https://twitter.com/Tricertops/status/951551714078941185 https://twitter.com/Tricertops/status/951551714078941185

runxel 7y ago
> I wonder if in-word camelcase boundaries would be doable as well Theoretically yes. But in practice most possibly no. OpenType tables just feature fixed length strings matching. It can't match to more powerful regular expressions. You would need an infinite number of OT rules. [0] If you'd have a well defined set, maybe it could work, but it would still be overwhelming fast. [0] http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net/gposgsub.html http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net/gposgsub.html

ryoppippi 7y ago

I applied a patch for powerline! If you want this, use it! https://github.com/ryoppippi/JetBrainsMono https://github.com/ryoppippi/JetBrainsMono

gabrielbauman 7y ago

As a Fira Code user, I like the look of JetBrains Mono - but I'll wait for a "light" weight.