29 ms·

Monaspace

• amerine 3y ago
  It's a really cool idea to have a collection of monospaced fonts that work wonderfully together. I can't wait to give this a spin today.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• turnsout 3y ago
  The "Texture Healing" feature is a really smart use of OpenType features to make problematic monospace combinations look much better without breaking the grid at all. One naive way to do this would be to create ligature pairs for difficult pairs (mi, lm, etc). But instead, they seem to be selecting character alternates that fill the fixed width differently based on their surroundings.
  • idan 3y ago
    It really is super clever! And the crazy part is that it's been possible for a super long time, just nobody thought of the technique. Mad props to Riley Cran and the entire crew at https://lettermatic.com https://lettermatic.com for devising this technique as a part of this project.
    • csande17 3y ago
      I'm curious: did the team consider applying the technique to letter pairs like Ty and TA that traditionally get kerned closer together in proportional fonts? As far as I can tell from the demo, these pairs currently aren't affected by texture healing, and they look a little awkward in Radon especially.
  • nvartolomei 3y ago
    Commit Mono font does something similar and calls it “Smart kerning”. Visit https://commitmono.com/ https://commitmono.com/ and click on the “04 Intelligent” tab for details. In practice this is unusable. Because the width of the letters now depends on the succeeding character, the text jumps as you write it. Super annoying. Cool for reading. Awful for writing.
    • Daneel_ 3y ago
      Exactly my experience as well.
    • naikrovek 3y ago
      [flagged]
    • CGamesPlay 3y ago
      It doesn't in this font? Possibly because of what they talk about where it optimistically gives as much space as possible to succeeding glyphs. You can try it on the page; the code sample boxes are editable. I see no jumping when I type "calming", their example word. [append] Oh, I do see some jumping when I type "optimized". Honestly, it doesn't seem very jarring to me; the jumping is always right where the edit point is so the added or removed letter causes a much bigger jump.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • sakjur 3y ago
      If this gets popular, I could see a text editor that lets you use a non-healing version of the font for any text that has been written in the viewport and then swaps it out as soon as you no longer looks at that block of text – or straight up uses a different font for my modifications compared to the committed code. But even without anything like that, if it’s good for reading I like to use different fonts when reviewing and writing code to help with the context-switch, so I think this could be useful to me. And I guess people in regions where a single keystroke isn’t always a single character such as Korea, China, Japan and the arab world might be used to the jarring effect already?
      • philsnow 3y ago
        > I could see a text editor that lets you use a non-healing version of the font for any text that has been written in the viewport and then swaps it out as soon as you no longer looks at that block of text The text editor widget on their page is a bunch of "line" divs with individual terms being inside spans. If you add an inline style of font-feature-settings: "calt" off; or, more completely, font-feature-settings: "calt" off,"dlig" var(--ligatures,1),"ss01" var(--ligatures,1),"ss02" var(--ligatures,1),"ss03" var(--ligatures,1),"ss04" var(--ligatures,1),"ss05" var(--ligatures,1),"ss06" var(--ligatures,1),"ss07" var(--ligatures,1),"ss08" var(--ligatures,1); to a single line div or a single term span, it won't do the healing. If one of the CSS pseudo selectors worked for these kinds of elements (I see there are a lot that apply to forms, but.. maybe :active / :active-within would work for editable spans?), you could have healing automatically apply to terms when they 'blur' / when they're no longer active.
  • alberth 3y ago
    I’m probably missing the obvious, but it seems to just make the “m” wider.
    • turnsout 3y ago
      The issue with that is that it would reduce the space between pairs that need it (such as mb). Taken to an extreme, mm would run together into one letter.
  • zokier 3y ago
    So many people here are now praising texture healing, but to me its just half-way measure. Why are we as a community so resistant for adopting variable-width fonts? This texture healing already breaks perfect character cell grid, so in some ways it feels like worst of both worlds. I feel at least partially the same about fancy ligatures; we could just use the actual characters in source code, Unicode is widely supported. Raku does that, but it would need better typesetting (with variable-width fonts) to really shine.
    • lionkor 3y ago
      thats not what it does - it maintains monoSPACE while chaning the characters to not look the same width -- the best of both worlds, if anything
      • omnimus 3y ago
        Its ok but instead of uneven spacing you get uneven character widths. It might be ok but there is a reason why type designers make every character to be the same and try to balance everything including spacing. Monospaced fonts designs are dictated exactly by that limit of fixed character+fixed space. But maybe the “healing” might not be verydistracting.
        • stevage 3y ago
          > there is a reason why type designers make every character to be the same and try to balance everything including spacing. But this was designed by type designers. So you can make exactly the same argument about texture healing.
    • SonOfLilit 3y ago
      I hate ligatures in code. It sometimes breaks out of the grid, but there still is a grid. Things are sometimes not micro-aligned but still macro-aligned, and that matters (to me).
      • zokier 3y ago
  • rob74 3y ago
    Meh... not convinced. Once you have toggled the checkbox a few times, you start noticing inconsistencies: e.g. in the example shown by default, the second "m" in "time_limit" is obviously wider than the first one because it has more space to "grow" having "i"s on both sides. Not sure if I like this...
    • JW_00000 3y ago
      Also, type mimi in the first code example: the two 'm's have different width...
  • solardev 3y ago
    This is really cool!
• dpc_01234 3y ago
  I was initially thinking ... "OK, another monospace font (family), look nice", until I got to "texture healing" which really made me want to try it out. I really like the idea of using different style of font for different things, but as primarily terminal user, I don't even know which terminals support it (if any), and then we would need CLI text editors support as well. But I think it's a great idea.
  • threePointFive 3y ago
    Theoretically, anything based on xterm should have the capability for it. ESC[<10-19>m is the escape sequence to pick font 0-9. In practice though, is a different question. I use Alacritty, but I cannot find if this is supported and trying to do it myself isn't getting any results.
    • DiabloD3 3y ago
      Alacritty does not support that, afaik.
    • BitFlogger 3y ago
      Texture healing requires ligatures (specifically `calt`) and Alacritty does not support ligatures.
• helix278 3y ago
  How would you configure a text editor or terminal to use different fonts based on syntax (e.g. neon for code, argon for comments)?
  • leipert 3y ago
    In vscode probably easy because it is all CSS? Other editors/terminal emulators would probably need to add support for this.
  • idan 3y ago
    Hi! I worked on this at Next. Unfortunately, it's on the editor to support mixing fonts. There's never been multiple compatible monospaced fonts before so no editors really support this yet. Lots of editors also don't support variable typefaces properly yet (ahem, VS Code) but this is going to change. Ultimately what you're describing is the future! But we have to release the typefaces to bootstrap that future. We made a prototype extension that hack it into VS Code. But they're hacky af and not really releasable.
    • ctenb 3y ago
      I wonder if terminal escape code sequences would arise to support this too!
    • afc 3y ago
      Do you know of any Linux terminal (eg. xterm, gnome-terminal, etc.) that would support multiple fonts? I'm intrigued, shouldn't be very hard to add support to command-line programs (once terminals supported it).
      • naikrovek 3y ago
        Wezterm does. expansive configuration and scripting abilities are available.
    • aidenn0 3y ago
      > so no editors really support this yet Emacs and Vim have both supported this since at least last century.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• markcollin 3y ago
  going to try this out.. clever font name ;)
• aquir 3y ago
  I keep using Berkeley Mono! That font is just perfect! This font and the styles are a bit wonky for me...
• csande17 3y ago
  I'm curious what people think of the "Mix & Match" examples. Radon (the handwriting one) seems to complement the other fonts well because it's basically an italic. But all the others are so similar, with their identical metrics and whatnot, that the "authoritative docstrings" and "Copilot voice" examples are really hard to distinguish.
  • whalesalad 3y ago
    tbh this immediately popped into my mind before scrolling down the page - having a handwritten comment is neat and adds another differentiation to reduce strain when browsing code. some will hate it, but personally I want to try it.
    • graypegg 3y ago
      I've loved Victor Mono [0] Italic for this reason for years! I find prose much easier to read with some slight joined-up lettering, which I totally concede is a 100% personal. Worth a look as well though! [0] https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/ https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/
  • ly 3y ago
    The mix and match is what convinced me to give this font a try. I’ve been using Operator Mono for years now specifically because of it’s true italics. I’ve wanted to switch to an open alternative to Operator Mono for a long time now, and I think because of the mix and match, this finally is the one.
  • notatoad 3y ago
    yeah, i flipped through the samples without even realizing it was changing anything in the code sample box until i got to the radon variant. those other variants are not nearly different enough to really convey information.
  • wjdp 3y ago
    I really like this idea. Is this supported anywhere yet or just something for future?
• itishappy 3y ago
  I like everything about this! Font families seem like an incredible idea that I'm surprised nobody's done before, variable fonts are new to me and super interesting, textural healing seems like a huge step forward, and damn if that isn't one of the smoothest sites I've ever played with. Nice work!
  • thrtythreeforty 3y ago
    > Font families seem like an incredible idea that I'm surprised nobody's done before Oh this has been done for decades. Metafont (by the inimitable Don Knuth) let you describe glyphs as toolpaths in code. You could have as many parameters as you wanted; I've seen examples where a sans-serif is smoothly swept into a serif. Metafont never got adopted as much as I would have hoped; the lack of a graphical editor and some impedance mismatch with OpenType probably prevented its wider adoption.
    • GuB-42 3y ago
      Also, according to Don Knuth himself: "Asking an artist to become enough of a mathematician to understand how to write a font with 60 parameters is too much".
      • bitwize 3y ago
        More like, asking a mathematician to become enough of a typographer to design a font that looks clean and consistent and actually aids reading is too much. Real typographers know that the Computer Modern family is garbage.
        • svat 3y ago
          Who are these typographers, any examples? Considering: • The design of Computer Modern was based on Monotype Modern 8A, which was made by a "real typographer" for Monotype corporation and used for decades in several textbooks by Addison-Wesley, including the first editions of TAOCP volumes 1–3 (and 2nd ed of vol 1). • Knuth got close feedback on the font specimens at various steps of the process (and incorporated the suggestions) from many of the world's top font designers, in particular Hermann Zapf, Matthew Carter, Richard Southall, Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, who between them are behind such typefaces as Palatino, Optima, Verdana, Georgia, and Lucida. (Zapf and Southall visited Knuth at Stanford and spent weeks working closely with him on the fonts.) I imagine they wouldn't have spent so much time on it if they thought it was "garbage". • Of course, Computer Modern, and Monotype Modern before it, are (intentionally) boring "workhorse" fonts for textbooks and won't win any points for being stylish or novel or a work of typographic genius — but within that category, CM is AFAICT something close to the best possible rendering of the basic design, very far from "garbage". I'm curious who thinks otherwise. (I've read a few reviews from typographers and no one said the font was bad; one I remember praised the even "texture" of the page, though that was more a result of TeX's Knuth–Plass line-breaking rather than the font itself.) • (There is also a well-known issue with CM's appearance on low-resolution devices like computer screens rather than print, and especially the "spindly" appearance of the vector font that usually ends up getting used today if one asks for Computer Modern—see my answer at https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/361722 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/361722 and links in the comments on it—but those have nothing to do with Knuth's design; in fact Knuth personally still uses the Metafont-generated bitmap fonts unlike everyone else. And there are now "newcomputermodern" and "mlmodern" to remedy this.)
• samus 3y ago
  Texture healing is a really smart and beautiful idea! I will try to apply it to Chinese handwriting, which is often monospace. A lot of common, but really dense characters (especially traditional ones, for example these: 邊鐵餐廳臺藥機麵顧露樓幫讓) could benefit from receiving additionally space to spread out.
• zaps 3y ago
  When I get that feeling / I need textural healing
  • Kiuhrly1 3y ago
    I have a love/hate relationship with that song. I hate it because some guy used to play it on repeat on a server-wide radio on an old Garry's Mod surf server I frequented... On the other hand, I love being reminded of those times. for anyone unaware, Marvin Gaye - Sexual Healing https://youtu.be/fn4i8bAfnMY https://youtu.be/fn4i8bAfnMY
• ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  Superfamily? they're just making up stuff so they can bundle a bunch of fonts and say people are using "theirs" blah
  • Kerrick 3y ago
    > Monospaced fonts are generally incompatible with one another. Each one uses different metrics, making it impossible to mix different fonts. Each Monaspace font is designed to be seamlessly mixed and matched. Layer more meaning onto code, with a palette that goes beyond colors and bolder weights. Build interfaces for code that require more structure and hierarchy. FTA. It means you can do things like have inline comments use Radon, docstrings use Xenon, code use Neon, and string literals use Krypton for more visual difference -- without the line heights and columns getting all weird because of it.
• redder23 3y ago
  I really hate most of these fontLigatures. They just confuse me, many of the character combination I never even used in the languages I code in. And others look so different that I would be afraid to not know what they actually are. Some seem useful but is seems I can not pick them individually and have to commit to an entire group of them. The symbol for </> (something I never used anyway) looks like the absolute worst to me, like how is that better? And especially of you do rarely or never used it you get forced into this shit if you like other things from that group and enable it. Turning two == into one long one, NO! I think people just overthink it, it becomes confusing and not more readable.
  • pie_flavor 3y ago
    Some other fonts use character variants for this, so you can personalize your own setup. For example, with Fira Code[0], if you want to tell VS Code to not use the long = for == but still space it in a less ugly way, instead of setting ligatures to true, you set it to "'ss08'", which will then do the same thing to === and != and !==. This is also where they can hide their 'overthinking' glyphs, so the discerning user can enable them but they won't disrupt you if you just install the font normally. For example I have ss06, ss07, and cv27 enabled, for distinct escaping backslashes, =~ and !~ operators, and smooth-square []. [0]: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode
  • amake 3y ago
    No one cares. Just don't use them.
  • vunderba 3y ago
    Like most things in life, it depends on the reader: - native language - mathematically or symbolically oriented - etc. I personally find them imminently readable and use with Fira Code font.
• readthenotes1 3y ago
  Beautiful. Even to my aesthetically un-nuanced sensitivity, these fonts look good
• bsder 3y ago
  Can we please stop with abusing ligatures for things like != into ≠? If you want APL, please use APL and leave the rest of us alone. != is two bloody characters not one. And now people are doing it for 3 characters. With this kind of thing, you get all the text editing idiocy of combining characters (like emojis) for no benefit at all. See: Text Editing Hates You Too https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/ https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/
  • idle_zealot 3y ago
    Fortunately for you the ligatures are optional and have no impact on the underlying text. To be "left alone" you have to do exactly nothing.
    • spartanatreyu 3y ago
      > To be "left alone" you have to do exactly nothing. Unfortunately that's not true. The problem shows itself when looking at codeblocks that developers share (in docs, blogs, videos, etc...) Ligatures become a readability problem.
      • akdor1154 3y ago
        If it bugs you that match, usercss?
        • chrismorgan 3y ago
          Videos?
          • uxp8u61q 3y ago
            At some point you'll just have to accept that not everyone has the exact same tastes as you. Initially it was "don't force ligatures on me I want to be left alone", now it's "other people are forbidden from using ligatures because I might be forced to gasp glance at one in a video". Grow up!
• kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  Lower case 'l' on Radon looks too much like a 'Z'. It needs rounder tails.
  • ksaj 3y ago
    When on its own, which it is in the descriptions, I couldn't tell if it was an I, Z or l. It looks cool, so I guess I'd just get used to it. But I fully agree that those tails are really exaggerated.
• Kiuhrly1 3y ago
  Wow, these are pretty nice, with a permissive license too by the looks of things. I like the serif one in particular, very readable to me.
• pie_flavor 3y ago
  This is a hearty number of ligatures, and yet it is still not enough for me. Now that != and <= are table stakes, I keep noticing how nice Fira Code's alignment of the * height in *ptr, or the centering of the : in X:Y, or the raising of the x in 0xFF are. And the shaping of the Krypton variant would be my favorite - if the crossbar of the lowercase t was not so far below the height of e.g. the lowercase c. So I think I'm still sticking with Fira Code for now (but will certainly be checking back in a year to see what they've changed with user feedback).
  • Terretta 3y ago
    Curiously for an example home page, the linked site's example ... // What if tentative ideas looked handwritten? /** * What if docstrings looked authoritative? */ ... misaligning the two ** in /** is awkward.
• layer8 3y ago
  No hinting apparently, so only for hi-DPI.
  • DiabloD3 3y ago
    That's all I need to know about this font. There is no point in cranking out yet another code font that doesn't have hinting. PragmataPro and Berkeley Mono are such well loved fonts not because of their aesthetic quality (code fonts are (proudly) ugly), but because of how well their hinting has been done. If I want an unhinted, but well performing, font... there is Iosevka. Which I use.
    • a_e_k 3y ago
      If you're interested in a free, but carefully hinted coding font, my Luculent font [0][1] may be worth a look. The hinting is its defining feature, since I hate fuzzy font rendering. I wrote every line of TTF hinting code in it myself (no autohinting), and it is legible down to 5x11 pixel sized characters even if you disable antialiasing, so long as your font engine interprets the hints. [0] http://eastfarthing.com/luculent/ http://eastfarthing.com/luculent/ [1] https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/luculent https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/luculent (live example in browser)
      • vertebrate 3y ago
        I've been using it for years, just want to say thank you, given the occasion.
      • DiabloD3 3y ago
        I'll have to remember to try it next time I update my font torture test table.
  • NoGravitas 3y ago
    It looks fine on my standard DPI screens, but I'm assuming that that's because the freetype2 autohinter is being used.
• wolverine876 3y ago
  In the sample text box, when I enable the grid, sometimes the gridlines pass right through the characters. For example, the default settings (Neon, size 16, weight 300, width 100, slant 0, texture healing on (or off), ligatures on), in the line "// Implement timing", the gridlines encroach on charcters in "Implement" and clearly intersect characters in "timing". If it's just an issue with the textbox, it doesn't matter. If it's an issue with the monospaced font, that's a problem.
  • shhsshs 3y ago
    That is a result of texture healing. The page explains how it works.
    • wolverine876 3y ago
      Texture healing should keep the letters within the grid. Also, it happens with texture healing on or off.
• wolverine876 3y ago
  Is there a functional purpose to Krypton? If it just looks cool, that's fine; I just wonder what I don't know about mono fonts. Edit and OT: Interesting HN algorithm behavior: I just wrote two posts in this thread (on different topics). The first appeared at the top of the page, as usual for new comments. When I clicked "Submit" on the second one, it appeared below the first one. My guess is that it was because it's much shorter. (First comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38213113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38213113 )
  • mzs 3y ago
    Krypton's 0 is angular how I like it for my coding font, but I only do it for zero. It'd be nice if the digits could vary how high they start, like in old textbooks.
• khaledh 3y ago
  I'm always interested in monospace fonts for coding. But personally, I still haven't found any font that can beat JetBrains Mono.
• cflewis 3y ago
  I enjoy the idea, but I do wonder why we don't see more condensed fonts like PragmataPro. I've been using it for close to a decade and I'd love to see more options in the space, but no-one seems willing to go that narrow. Berkeley Graphics has been promising a condensed version of Berkeley Mono for almost a year but nothing has happened there. Even Monaspace here has a width slider, which starts at "wider than PragmataPro" and just slides to "silly width". I wonder why they didn't try sliding down to a condensed version?
  • orev 3y ago
    Iosevka is pretty narrow and also popular. Not sure if it meets your definition, but might be worth a look.
    • cflewis 3y ago
      Yeah, it is because AFAIK Iosevka is a free interpretation of PragmataPro! So you are definitely correct :D
    • sph 3y ago
      I am a big fan of Protesilaos Stavrou's custom "Iosevka Comfy" build (https://github.com/protesilaos/iosevka-comfy https://github.com/protesilaos/iosevka-comfy). This is probably the best font ever designed to my eyes, even more than my paid version of PragmataPro. Here is a screenshot of Iosevka Comfy in action: https://share.combo.cc/-bN9f8hAiiG https://share.combo.cc/-bN9f8hAiiG and Iosevka Comfy Motion, with tasteful serifs: https://share.combo.cc/-BNHfhV4zgu https://share.combo.cc/-BNHfhV4zgu
  • inferiorhuman 3y ago
    I just discovered M+. I rather like the "60" variants, and found the default (50) width is too narrow for me. For my tastes legibility seems to suffer with the 50 variants. However, that might be narrow enough for you. https://mplusfonts.github.io/ https://mplusfonts.github.io/
  • amake 3y ago
    I agree entirely. PragmataPro is my daily driver, and anything else feels way too expansive. Default Iosevka is close, but the leading is much larger. Luckily you can customize it to be almost identical (set `leading = 1110` in the config; value obtained by trial and error).
• awnion 3y ago
  I want "m" with a short middle leg. Can I have it? E.g. in Iosevka (https://typeof.net/Iosevka/ https://typeof.net/Iosevka/) I can choose.
• slotrans 3y ago
  Is there a trick to getting these to work in Sublime Text? I normally use Source Code Pro, which also comes in a bunch of variations, and I can set font_face to "Source Code Pro Medium" or "Source Code Pro Semibold Italic" and I get the right result. But setting it to "Monataype Krypton Medium" doesn't work at all. "Monatype Krypton" does, but the Regular variants are too skinny.
  • anasrin 3y ago
    The name format is "Monaspace <variant>", and to use weight in Sublime Text "Monaspace <variant> <weight>".
    • mradecki 3y ago
      Confirmed, other resposne is wrong. Format that worked for me is : "font_face": "Monaspace Neon Light",
  • inferiorhuman 3y ago
    Font selection is always a bit wonky on OSX in my experience. Sublime doesn't offer a separate font weight knob but does offer "font_options" which takes an array of string values – specifying bold will get you a bold by default font. For an arbitrary weight what worked for me was to use the PostScript name e.g. "MonaspaceArgonVar-ExtraLightItalic". There are plenty of ways to find the PS name but on OSX (on Sonoma at least) you can go into the Font Book app and find it under identifiers after you've selected a specific variant.
    • slotrans 3y ago
      Thanks, this works! So tl;dr it's: "MonaspaceVARIANT-WEIGHT", no spaces.
      • inferiorhuman 3y ago
        In this case yes, but I would double check the PostScript name because I believe that naming convention is not a hard requirement.
• mzs 3y ago
  It does not set the mono flag, so I had to try it with GTK2 gvim to even load the font: % ttfmono MonaspaceArgon-Regular.otf monospaced flag = 0 (0 = variable-width, otherwise = monospaced) Sadly I think that because of that flag it does not enable ligatures. I was able to see ligatures and text healing in vim running in a patched st* though. I really like it thanks! The text healing only moves the line subtly as I type and when I cursor over there are no droppings from the widened 'm' for example. It's well thought-out for code. If I could ask for a feature it would be to select some variants, like angular 0 with reverse slash or to leave the ! in the != ligature. To see what I mean: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/blob/main/doc/stylistic-sets.md https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/blob/main/doc/stylistic-... * https://st.suckless.org/patches/ligatures/ https://st.suckless.org/patches/ligatures/
  • inferiorhuman 3y ago
    Are you sure? On OSX they're showing up in Font Book under "Fixed Width" fonts. I'm using whatever version was released today, so that might be a recent fix.
    • mzs 3y ago
      Just checked, don't show-up in under fixed, monaspace 1.000 macos 13.6.1
      • inferiorhuman 3y ago
        On Sonoma: https://i.imgur.com/AMspnPN.png https://i.imgur.com/AMspnPN.png
        • mzs 3y ago
          Probably font book decides it's monospaced when verifying the font. I doubt FreeType would consider it mono (that's what matters for GTK2). What's fc-list -v show on your machine under fixed?
  • 7839284023 3y ago
• anasrin 3y ago
  Apparently line height is to tight on Alacritty and Kitty, I would like to have line height variant like width variant.
  • ar0n 3y ago
    FWIW you can tweak the line height in kitty, see https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/#opt-kitty.modify_font https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/#opt-kitty.modify_font
• omneity 3y ago
  Texture healing is that kind of feature you never knew you needed until you knew about it. A perfect candidate for my next obsession.
• StevePerkins 3y ago
  It's a shame that on VS Code at least (I'm not sure if this applies in other contexts), the "textual healing" feature goes hand-in-hand with ligatures. There is no way to enable textual healing if you prefer not to use programming ligatures.
  • matthewlehner 3y ago
    From https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace?tab=readme-ov-file#visual-studio-code https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace?tab=readme-ov-file#v... > If you want coding ligatures but do not want texture healing, you can elide the calt setting:
    • jeswin 3y ago
      GP asked for the opposite of that. Ligatures are troublesome while writing code.
      • flexagoon 3y ago
        Then you can enable the calt setting and disable all other ligatures
        • philsnow 3y ago
          There are even checkboxes on the page to simultaneously disable ligatures and enable texture healing. They're just controlling whether various subfeatures of font-feature-settings are off/on. I have a bunch of font-feature-settings subfeatures turned off explicitly in my userChrome.css, so it took me a little while to realize that that was what was messing with this site. I couldn't figure out what texture healing was supposed to do because toggling it wasn't helping, but it was because of my userChrome.
• ollien 3y ago
  I'm always really confused about how dotted zeroes became the norm for these fonts. I always confuse them with eights and vastly prefer slashed zeroes. Would love to try this if it had such a variant.
  • NetOpWibby 3y ago
    I suggested slash zero in an issue and some rando mentioned dotted zeroes serve the same purpose. So annoying.
  • thristian 3y ago
    There's languages where a slashed circle is a letter, and a slashed zero makes things confusing. Dotted zeroes have much less opportunity for confusion in that direction. I guess type designers could emphasise the convex sides of a dotted zero with the concave sides of an "8" to keep them visually distinct, but I don't know if this font does that.
    • computerfriend 3y ago
      Θ.
      • jbverschoor 3y ago
        Theta
      • YellowSuB 3y ago
        I figured he was referring to Ø used in Danish.
        • computerfriend 3y ago
          Yes, but the dot-zero also has a letter to confuse it with.
    • Diti 3y ago
      This is why some fonts like Atkison Hyperlegible use reverse slashed zero, which removes the confusion.
• jskherman 3y ago
  I'm bothered by the Rd symbol of Radon on the page, it's should be Rn. It makes me double-check if there's actually an element that's not Radium (Ra), not Radon (Rn), but also starts with an R and has a d in its name.
  • sreetamdas 3y ago
    Noticed this too, it's been since fixed :)
  • tmtvl 3y ago
    Rhodium, but that's Rh.
    • jskherman 3y ago
      Neat, one more element to the "Rd" element group.
• BD103 3y ago
  This looks really cool! I personally use Jetbrains Mono [0] as my goto font, but with the different-fonts-per-context and texture-healing features I might switch to this. 0: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/
• djha-skin 3y ago
  Unfortunately a brilliant and predictable play by Microsoft following its established "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" doctrine. This beautiful feature is created by the GitHub team and is only available on VS Code, strengthening its lead over the other editors. This fact has led me to look more closely at Commit Mono, suggested by nvartolomei in his comment (this article). I love the texture healing idea, and that font looks to be more open and easier to use in other environments.
  • jamesgeck0 3y ago
    Using multiple fonts isn't available in VS Code right now, not without doing something hacky with 3rd party custom CSS plugin. It isn't available anywhere without doing something hacky (setting different fonts for italic and bold in the terminal, for example).
  • NetOpWibby 3y ago
    I have never and don't ever intend to use VS Code. If you're anti Microsoft, just say so.
  • uxp8u61q 3y ago
    It's a font, you can use it wherever you want...
    • NoGravitas 3y ago
      It does seem to only be tested in VS Code, though. It "works" everywhere (except some terminal emulators, which don't see it as monospaced), but you may have trouble enabling all of the features everywhere.
• chrismorgan 3y ago
  If someone who maintains this site happens to be here: in the “code ligatures” section, where .overflow-y-scroll is used, that should be doing `overflow-y: auto` rather than `overflow-y: scroll`… though honestly I’m sceptical about the wisdom of the height capping anyway. `overflow: scroll` is almost never (p>0.999) the right thing, and users that don’t use overlay scrollbars are suffering because of the poor choice of name, getting a forced scrollbar when one is almost never appropriate. (This includes almost all Windows for now, I believe; and some Linux, probably no longer most since GNOME is bent on ruining everyone’s life; and some macOS.) —⁂— When is `overflow: scroll` legitimate? One obsolete case is preventing document scrolling when a modal is open, without triggering reflow due to the scrollbar disappearing, but I say the side-effects are still worse than the problem (the document scrollbar is nonsensical while the modal is open), so you should let it be (why was scrolling the document under the modal such a problem anyway?), or prevent scrolling by means other than scrollbar manipulation, by capturing it in the modal backdrop. Another obsolete case is avoiding a bit of layout shift when switching between pages if some fit in the viewport an others don’t; but honestly it’s so long since I’ve seen a site where any pages fit in the viewport… and more to the point, this is better handled with `scrollbar-gutter` (not supported by Safari; you could use @supports to fall back to `overflow: scroll`, but the importance and number of affected users—since Safari is normally overlay scrollbars—are so tiny I don’t think it’s worth it). The only arguably legitimate case I can think of is on spreadsheets/data grid components, where you can reasonably prefer to display a noop scrollbars rather than just reserving the space for them. OK, and one other: code to find scrollbar dimensions for various layout purpose normally uses `overflow: scroll` on a temporary element and this is legit, even though you could do it other, mildly more complex ways; but it also makes assumptions about scrollbars always being the same size, and there’s honestly no reason why they should be, and `scrollbar-width` has shown a distinct appetite for using thinner scrollbars in some places and a browser could reasonably vary its default scrollbar width based on the dimensions. And scrollbar-dimension-finding isn’t particularly common, and the problems it’s used to solve are mostly better handled in other ways; now if only viewport units weren’t broken by design in the presence of document scrollbars… I’ve contemplated campaigning for explicit deprecation of `overflow: scroll` and getting warnings shown in dev tools if you use them, because I’ve seen it misused so many times in the last decade, where people actually meant `overflow: auto`, and other than scrollbar-dimension-finding doubt I’ve seen even a single legitimate and reasonable use in that time.
• vario 3y ago
  i use Fira Code. nothing beats Fira.
  • vario 3y ago
    [flagged]
• haolez 3y ago
  Can this be used on Linux?
  • NoGravitas 3y ago
    Yes, but how many of the features will work, and how to configure them, will depend on your application and the toolkit it uses. It also seems to vary by application on MacOS and Windows, so I don't think it's notably worse on Linux.
• ngshiheng 3y ago
  what happened to Helium?
• amir734jj 3y ago
  I have tried many fonts over the years. Nothing beats Monaco.
• hutattedonmyarm 3y ago
  Looks kind of cool but I cannot stand their { and }. Otherwise I might give it a try
  • lloeki 3y ago
    I find { to be ok, although I kinda expected them to differ across the font family (esp. Mechanical) The one that kills me is the squiggly comparisons ~>, I find it horrible and doesn't evoke the kind of comparison I see in Gemfiles. I read |> as "pipe + redirect" for me so turning them to triangles make them lose a ton of meaning. Oh and != is so much wider than >=, probably because == is, so as not to be confused with = which kinda makes sense but is visually jarring. It's even more jarring with === which gets so wide and thin three-band that it loses its "equalness" and becomes a striped rectangle. The healing is a nice trick but the difference of m character width riles me up when they line up vertically: limit gamut I can't quite make sense of the whole of ss04 </ glyphs. I feared \/ and /\ would be terrible for awkperlruby regexes, but they only apply if there's whitespace around (still / \/ / is an improbable yet valid regex that would have it transformed) Turns out a font can only infer so much based only on characters when combinations are contextual. But the most annoying thing is that even if that was solved, ligatures are terrible when editing, especially when your (line) caret ends up in the middle of a ligature or (box) over half of the character (or third), which breaks the illusion/abstraction as you now have to think about the underlying characters. Definitely a no-go for me, but to each his own.
    • hutattedonmyarm 3y ago
      To be fair, ligatures are optional. I don’t like them either, but as long as I can turn it off I‘m ok
      • lloeki 3y ago
        True! In a way my desire for aesthetics somehow wants to like such ligatures - probably a bit too much - but they always fail for me because of the corner cases and leaky details and the pragmatic me yells at my aesthetic one for being so hung up on useless shiny things ;)
• nielsbot 3y ago
  Seems like in modern times, on modern systems, we can move beyond monospaced fonts for code. I have recommended this many times here, but I use a proportional coding font: Input Sans https://input.djr.com https://input.djr.com
  • mcny 3y ago
    Does it support ligatures such as >= to ≥? I tried the web preview on a phone maybe it is a limitation of Firefox on Android? For others, this is ligatures https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/glossary/ligature https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/glossary/ligature
    • nielsbot 3y ago
      I don’t think so? I personally don’t use that feature :)
  • peebeebee 3y ago
    What are the reasons for your recommendations? One problem I might see is that it is even harder to spot a typo with this font.
    • nielsbot 3y ago
      For me, I think proportional fonts are the way text was meant to seen, and monospaced fonts exist to accommodate the limitations of computers, printers and typewriters. Why is that? In text or punctuation? For words it’s more readable. The punctuation is designed for coding. The numerals are still monospaced.
  • kevincox 3y ago
    I would love to use a proportional font for coding but I am not aware of any Vim frontends that cleanly support it. I would be fine to stick with using monospace when using Vim over SSH but even though Neovim has opened the floodgates to frontends it seems that very few support proportional fonts (and the ones that do tend to be painfully slow to use).
• tntaben 3y ago
  The Xenon is very similar to Go fonts. but it's still a really great set of fonts.
• bitwize 3y ago
  Still looks worse than Iosevka. Let's just embrace writing code in proportional fonts already.
• fomine3 3y ago
  Anyone could explain why *** ligature exists?
  • SonOfLilit 3y ago
    I'm guessing they'd say "because it looks nicer". I'm not aware of a language that treats it specially. I do think I've seen it before, I don't think it's a new idea. Probably some typographic tradition from when it was used as a section separator in prose.
  • tlh 3y ago
    I’ve not seen it in code, but if you were writing prose you might use it as a section break. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterism_(typography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterism_(typography) Edit: it’s called an Asterism
    • Ndymium 3y ago
      It's used in Robot Framework code, but that's the only place I can think of.
• citeguised 3y ago
  A nice detail I never noticed in typography is how the $-sign loses the vertical line on heavier weights. It's visible on the first example-line, the font gets bolder on hover.
• eviks 3y ago
  Cool new font features, though hopefully we get a chance to get proper proportional fonts insead of this hack in the next decade or two
• jbverschoor 3y ago
  The site is awesome, but in VSCode it looks messy, and the characters are too wide. Sticking with Victor Mono.
• globular-toast 3y ago
  I've tried many of the hip programming fonts but the one I keep coming back to is Ubuntu Mono. It's the only font that can give me a good density on my standard DPI screen. All the others seem to look like absolute crap when they are small and only look good when each character uses up about twice the pixels that I want it to. Makes me wonder how other people deal with so few characters on their screen, or is everyone using high DPI, >1080p monitors? I might try this one, but I doubt it will be any improvement.
• tempodox 3y ago
  I'm staying on BitstromWera Nerd Font. Works great with Starship. https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads https://starship.rs https://starship.rs
• brailsafe 3y ago
  The website and typeface(s) design look like they took a tremendous amount of work.
• leokennis 3y ago
  This is definitely one of the nicer of the 100’s of monospaced fonts. But my personal preference remains Consolas.
• camgunz 3y ago
  Part of me loves texture healing, part of me hates it, but I think enough of me likes it to maybe give it a try. Did find a "bug" or something where a bunch of "///////" goes out of whack though.
• mhd 3y ago
  With all these different faces being displayed at once, this risks being the typographical equivalent of "Angry Fruit Salad" syntax highlighting…
• dan-robertson 3y ago
  The texture healing feature seems awesome, and supporting lots of weights, OT features, etc seems good (so long as your editor supports them, though web-based editors like vscode should). I don’t love the italic options — most of the variants only change slant. Xenon changes a little. I guess you’re meant to switch to Radon for italics but I find it looks far too scratchy, even if you increase the weight a bit (which will then not match the rest of the text). I also don’t love how all-caps text renders, though I don’t see that much all-caps at the moment.
• ulrischa 3y ago
  Quite good except Radon. I can not look at it
• tambourine_man 3y ago
  I got addicted to nerdfont style icons everywhere. This seems awesome, but I wound try it without it.
• jwr 3y ago
  Beautiful, but too wide. Iosevka NF lets me fit a lot more information and work comfortably in three columns of code in my Emacs on a 5K screen.
• amai 3y ago
  My monospace font is https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/latinmodernmonolight/ https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/latinmodernmonolight/
• stevage 3y ago
  I'm confused that Neon and Argon are described as "sans" when they seem to have serifs? See the bottoms of the i and r for instance.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• dreday 3y ago
  Looks amazing
• char101 3y ago
  Doesn't appear in gVim on Windows, need to set the panose attribute first: from fontTools import ttLib from path import Path output_dir = Path('mono') for file in Path('.').files('*.otf'): print(file) font = ttLib.TTFont(file) font['post'].isFixedPitch = 1 font['OS/2'].panose.bProportion = 9 font.save(output_dir / file.name) font.close()