10 ms·

Victor Mono Typeface

208 points by jbverschoor 3y ago

hurril 3y ago
This is one of my favourite fonts. Used to switch between it and Pragmata Pro before I got myself Berkeley Mono.
bitwize 3y ago
It's not as nice as Iosevka, but it's up there on my list of monospaced coding typefaces for graphical editors. (Terminals need chunky bitmap fonts, the Atari ST hi-res mono font being a particular favorite of mine.)
fsck_init 3y ago
“Old but sane potus” in the ex screenshot is just pure cringe
fictorial 3y ago
I've used Victor Mono in the past and cannot say I enjoy it because of the X-height but this is subjective of course. I am a big fan of HackGen Console NF which flies under the radar. https://github.com/yuru7/HackGen https://github.com/yuru7/HackGen or brew install font-hackgen-nerd
xolve 3y ago
I actually like Victor Mono. Ligatures, italics and cursive comments are my favorite features. It helps me to visually classify different sections of code, without being dependent on just colour of the text (I find current code themes already way too colourful!).
kurtextrem 3y ago
been using for longer now and I still love it the most. Might try Ghost from Vercel, or GHs latest font to compare, but every other mono font didn't come close to the italics and general style
- saikatsg 3y ago
  Ghost -> Geist
- exusn 3y ago
  If you like denser fonts like Victor, I would also recommend checking out Iosevka. It's similar, but to me it feels a bit nicer.
  - hh_throwaway385 3y ago
    Victor Mono is one of my top fonts, specially because I like to use tiny sizes + a bit condensed to get some extra columns. Iosevka becomes illegible under the same size, so despite being more condensed, Victor still wins for me.
karmakaze 3y ago
Sorry but that script 'true' doesn't belong in a programming font--monospace only.
- eropple 3y ago
  Monospace/proportional is orthogonal to roman/italic; that italic 'true' is still monospace. They do have an oblique variant instead of italic, though.
  - karmakaze 3y ago
    Yes, I meant it's a 'monospace (font) only' and not a programming font.
- rubjo 3y ago
  I have Booleans in italic (blasphemy!) :D and find it is immediately recognizeable that they are spelt correctly when the editor formats them that way. YMMV.
  - karmakaze 3y ago
    I have no problem with italics. What I object to is one that appears cursive (script) and calls itself a programming font.
mizudashi 3y ago
Does anyone know where the use of cursive-style characters in monospace fonts originated from? (My guess would be that it came from something like Operator Mono from Hoefler & Co.) I've always found the cursive to be a little jarring, since the cursive characters usually look so different from the normal ones, and switching between cursive and normal styles makes it slower for me to visually parse a section of code. I always thought that was an odd choice given that many folks seem to highly value legibility and immediate character recognition when they pick a monospace font.
- naikrovek 3y ago
  First place I saw it was Operator Mono. I think we place a bit too much weight on how much font matter, but then again, I couldn't find one I liked, so I made my own, so who knows.
  - timeon 3y ago
    > I think we place a bit too much weight on how much font matter Are you expecting us to believe you when you had to create your own font?
- doubloon 3y ago
  IBM had a cursive font for typewriters
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    Yup, IBM Selectric Scribe (towards the bottom of the page): http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-44934.html http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-44934.html It was a bit of a "novelty" font for typewriters. Almost like the Comic Sans of its day. It wasn't meant to be used as italics, it was for typing a fun invitation or more "personal" letter or something like that. I can't find any information on it specifically though, whether it was the first. It wouldn't surprise me if it were, however.
    - rntz 3y ago
jihadjihad 3y ago
This looks nice and clean, I like it. I'll give it a shot and do the Pepsi challenge against my current favorite, JetBrains Mono [0]. I also like the play on Hamburgevons [1] for the examples--one of them is OldButSanePotus. 0: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburgevons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburgevons
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Ha ha, I have so many mono fonts now. I guess it comes from spending as much time on HN...
- PKop 3y ago
  You can compare using their tool if you scroll down that page. I also use Jetbrains Mono. A cursory comparison seems like Jetbrains is clearer. Look at $, but also other characters.
- rubjo 3y ago
  Ha ha good catch ;)
jbverschoor 3y ago
I personally removed the Italics, so that the Oblique style is used for comments (had to alter some preferences for that). The italics are hard to read when the size is small. But I'm loving the font face. Super clear.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hakunin 3y ago
Been using this font for a while, but ultimately ended up switching back to Input Mono Condensed. It’s similar, but looks neater to me. And no cursive.
doubloon 3y ago
Impressive. Let's see Paul Allen's mono.
- kinduff 3y ago
  I'm amazed that my brain was able to read this in the voice right from the first word.
notnmeyer 3y ago
i like cursive italics—they make me feel fancy. i’ve been using dank mono for a bit now and have been enjoying it. going to give this a try!
crazygringo 3y ago
I'm generally pretty supportive of new typefaces, but this one strikes me as... not very legible. The x-height is so uncommonly high it makes it genuinely difficult to distinguish between uppercase/ascending and lowercase letters at a glance (e.g. 'U' vs 'u', or 'h' vs. 'n'), and similarly the descender is so tiny it makes it hard to distinguish certain letters at a glance (e.g. 'q' vs 'p'). The whole point of large-enough ascenders and descenders is to recognize the shapes of whole words before looking at their letters, which these dimensions destroy. The extremely square aspect of rounded segments similarly makes them harder to distinguish from straight segments at a glance (e.g. 'U' vs 'O' are far more similar than you want for legibility). Not to mention, italic cursive is particularly difficult to read. Handwritten-style cursive was never designed for legibility -- it was designed for speed in writing. Adopting it in a body-text typeface meant for reading adds work for the reader to decipher it. I don't want to be so negative, but typeface design has certain principles that the creator is simply ignoring. They're not arbitrary or aesthetic, but rather are directly about functional legibility. At the end of the day, this typeface goes out of its way to be surprisingly difficult to read. You can read it, but it simply takes more effort. Which is generally the last thing you want in a typeface for coding (or anything body text).
- johnsillings 3y ago
  Same reaction here. Legibility is below-average, and I don't love the look & feel either.
  - rubjo 3y ago
    That’s ok, thank you for having a look!
- mikeortman 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - rob74 3y ago
    Being supportive of new typefaces doesn't mean you have to like everything you see? Personally, I'm biased because I prefer the "good old" typewriter-style monospace fonts with serifs, which already eliminates around 90% of "programming fonts". My current favorite (not only for Go) is Go Mono (https://go.dev/blog/go-fonts https://go.dev/blog/go-fonts).
RadiozRadioz 3y ago
Sorry, ligatures are not for me. I don't get it. Why would you ever want symbols to collapse like that in a functional monospace font? Just looks like a bunch of funky unicode characters peppered throughout my source. And my caret can travel _inside_ one of these special marks? No thanks.
- nurettin 3y ago
  Do you also care about inverted scroll and dark/light themes? None of it matters.
- politelemon 3y ago
  I sometimes feels there's now a race between typefacers to stuff as many ligatures as possible to the point that it's bordering in indecipherability and clownishness. There's definitely an audience for this though, else why would they do it.
  - chalsprhebaodu 3y ago
    Have you considered that it’s not indecipherable or clownish and perhaps you are a part of a group that just doesn’t get it?
    - eyelidlessness 3y ago
      Not OP, but that’s my conclusion. I also don’t like programming font ligatures, but I personally find it annoying when people who share my opinion feel the need to point it out in a discussion of fonts clearly designed for people who don’t share my opinion. It’s highly subjective and the prevalence of these ligatures has never been a huge burden for me, because fonts without them are rather prevalent as well, as are means to bypass them in my own use.
      - nrabulinski 3y ago
        And you can use the font with ligatures disabled! Almost as if having ligatures was a preference that doesn’t influence those who don’t want them yet may convince someone who does to try out font X :)
stayux 3y ago
Try this: https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts Thank me later:) Context: https://ia.net/topics/in-search-of-the-perfect-writing-font https://ia.net/topics/in-search-of-the-perfect-writing-font
agent327 3y ago
Give me Liberty Mono or give me death! No wait, it's called "Liberation Mono". But it's still a great font for coding. https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/liberation-mono https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/liberation-mono
benrutter 3y ago
I'm curious, does anybody else change their terminal/editor font about once every two months only to immediately decide."no I don't like change" and go back to their standard? (In my case JetBrains Mono) I'd don't know if it's that I genuinely prefer that font, or just that I've spent so long looking at it my brain can't handle anything else.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  I tried a bunch, wasn't quite happy until I found Comic Mono. It's unironically is the superior programming font if you have dyslexia. Makes an enormous difference in my reading speed.
  - starkparker 3y ago
    Interestingly, it might not be the Comic Sans of it that helps.[1] If your editor or terminal has the option, increasing the tracking/space between letters in any sans-serif font can help with letter-flipping issues. Disclaimer: I'm both mildly dyslexic and a more severe letter-flipper/mirror-writer (visual processing issues)[2] since childhood 1: https://www.boia.org/blog/does-comic-sans-benefit-people-with-dyslexia https://www.boia.org/blog/does-comic-sans-benefit-people-wit... 2: https://www.understood.org/en/articles/faqs-about-reversing-letters-writing-letters-backwards-and-dyslexia https://www.understood.org/en/articles/faqs-about-reversing-...
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      It's literally the only font that has this effect on my reading I've found, seems to be something with the letter shapes. It basically feels like putting on prescription glasses, suddenly all the text becomes ten times more legible. Playing with the spacing of another font doesn't seem to have a similar effect. Although I'm open to the fact that there's probably a whole spectrum of different processing disorders that fly under the banner of dyslexia, so mileage may definitely vary.
- ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
  Just happened to me too, I've tried some I found at https://www.programmingfonts.org/ https://www.programmingfonts.org/. I again returned to using Hasklig - Source Code pro with Ligatures - in the editor.
_hao 3y ago
Yuck. Definitely not for me. I'll stick with Inconsolata.
ssgodderidge 3y ago
Awesome font, but not for me. The kerning is just too small for a text editor for my eyes. I bet others would like it. The side-by-side comparison tool with different fonts is AMAZING. Major props to the designer. Every font site should do that. I loved immediately comparing the font vs my current font _in browser_, without downloading any files.
- rubjo 3y ago
  Glad you liked the compare view :) Yeah, I know it’s a bit compressed, that’s the way I prefer it though.
ssgodderidge 3y ago
Same discussion from 2019 on this page here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21366412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21366412
kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
Needs an alternate cursive glyph for italic 'r' at the start of a word. Probably others too.
liveoneggs 3y ago
dang that website is fancy
amir734jj 3y ago
This is unrelated ... is it just me but I have been in love with Monaco, I can't use anything else.
mike986 3y ago
It's amazing we have so many high quality open source fonts / independent effort working on them nowadays. Also a big fan of condensed mono fonts Oreilly used to use "The Sans Mono Condensed" which is amazing. Other favorites of mine: PragmataPro (paid), Iosevka Comfy Fixed , M Plus 50 (free). Anyone has other recommendation for good condensed fonts ? (Especially Serif / Sans)
xwowsersx 3y ago
Cool typeface, but pretty illegible to me (I realize this is very personal). I don't think my eyes could handle this for more than a few minutes. That's the thing about typefaces — there are typefaces that are far "prettier" and more interesting than the ones I use, but they don't scale in the sense that they just can't be used as your daily driver. Good typefaces for all day programming strike a balance between style, legibility and "plainness" that makes them suitable for staring at all day every day.
benvds 3y ago
I've been using it for months and I love everything about it. Thanks Rubjo!
- rubjo 3y ago
  You’re very welcome, it’s a joy to hear that it works for others as well :)
amelius 3y ago
Big fan of Iosevka Term Regular for programming. The condensed font takes a day or two to get used to, but it gives you a lot of extra screen space. https://typeof.net/Iosevka/ https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
- rubjo 3y ago
  Iosevka is such a nice font, ever-evolving, and surely what I would have used if I hadn’t enjoyed Victor Mono more :)
  - amelius 3y ago
    Like I said, it takes a little time/effort to fully appreciate it! ;)
zare_st 3y ago
I don't dislike this font visually but it needs a lot of work. How I approach "reviewing" monospace fonts is whether I would immediately or eventually change them if they came as default. Monospace fonts that come with default KDE for instance are passable and I'll change them eventually. If this font was default to anywhere I'd change it immediately. Using an explicit "human style" for comments implies that the code belongs to the "machine"? Humans wrote everything. The italics font is useless for programming. If I compare it to any standard fonts in the box below on site I can notice A) higher glyphs B) cartoony comments. And that's it.
jojohohanon 3y ago
Obl: everytime we do a font thread, I ask if anyone knows a font that is * proportional * sans * has programming ligatures * clearly differentiates 1l and 0O The closest I’ve come was iosevka. But it was not quite proportional and I wasn’t font of its looks.
- toastal 3y ago
  Iosevka’s customizations are a gem. I can ‘fix’ the things I dislike about it with ease.
codedokode 3y ago
The page uses too large font size for code examples. It is easy to look good at a large size. I advise to set page zoom to 70% or less before comparing font legibility.
sebastianconcpt 3y ago
Lovely quality. I celebrate that. Ligatures are a deal breaker for me tho. With centuries of use cases, we crafted an alphabet that abstracted phonemes, one per symbol, in a carefully isolated, unambiguous and successful way. Ligatures come and with a stroke of design creativity inject ambiguity and de-standardisation where those problems were previously carefully solved.
- toastal 3y ago
  I dislike them too, but they can be disabled. This makes them ‘good’ for remote pair with something like upterm so two users that disagree on the subject can have it their way. Inappropriate usage is rampant making presentations & in-person pairing way more difficult/unclear (luckily userStyles can be used to prevent it in the browser). What we need is languages to stop clinging to US keyboards as a limiter where => doesn’t need to be misunderstood as ⇒ or ≥.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  Ligatures overcome the typographic limitations we've had since ASCII came along. For example -> became a convention because we didn't have a way to write → easily. Now we do.
  - sebastianconcpt 3y ago
    Is not standard and, as I said, creates ambiguity and additional cognitive load for a weak reason.
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      …for you. Be careful when you state personal opinion as fact. I’m not claiming that they’re universally good, just that I like them (and so do lots of other people). Your claims are far from universal.
      - sebastianconcpt 3y ago
        But notice is not an opinion that most fonts you see everywhere are not using ligatures. They are a subset which is the opposite of being universally adopted as norm. Which is the point I'm raising: The norm expects you to unambiguously interpret certain symbols and ligatures dilutes that normal convenience to read symbols unambiguously. Your brain acquired a taste to adjust the parsing of these symbols, that taste isn't universal nor is it the norm.
nrml_amnt 3y ago
Beautiful website (mobile). Beautiful font. Although I must agree that it’s not as legible as Fira or Ubuntu in an editor, I would certainly consider this font for aesthetic purposes for presentation, etc. It looks fantastic on your site.
ajross 3y ago
> I'm generally pretty supportive of new typefaces I guess I am in the abstract, but... no, I guess I'm more "bewildered" by new typefaces. Especially mono fonts targetted at source code display. I mean, this world just doesn't have elaborate requirements. And it was solved, like, dead-on-done-to-perfection with the open source release of Bitstream Vera two decades ago. I haven't wanted a new font since. Frankly I can barely tell the difference between most of them (not this one though -- yikes, that cursive thing is weird). I mean, why? Why not spend your font design hours making something for general text that people might notice. Hackers are poor discriminators and frankly very well served already.
amai 3y ago
See also https://www.codingfont.com/ https://www.codingfont.com/ and https://www.programmingfonts.org/ https://www.programmingfonts.org/
rednafi 3y ago
JetBrains Mono says invictus maneo
idbehold 3y ago
I wish we could get a new HN guideline to not make comments for or against ligatures in monospaced fonts. You're not going to convince anyone.
- rubjo 3y ago
  Are you implying that no one ever changes their opinions in discussions on the Internet? :D
thm 3y ago
PragmataPro for life.
redder23 3y ago
Don't like it, looks to stretched vertically, not easy to read, especially having seen Berkeley Mono here today that looks super nice.
Zetobal 3y ago
There were a lot of monospace font postings in the last week and they all had some novelty but this one is horrid and from a typographer standpoint - badly executed.
L0stLink 3y ago
Though ligatures when I first saw them looked really cool but trying them out I quickly realized how much I hated actually reading and writing code with them turned on. Cursive has also been an odd choice for monospace fonts to me, I don't like how they break the expected uniformity of the monospace text. Varying font weight, color and using italics has always been enough for me.
0xblinq 3y ago
horrible
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
Crossbars on the capital "i": CHECK A zero that's distinguishable from an O: CHECK So this thing is free of the two most-common mistakes in font design.
x3n0ph3n3 3y ago
This is my favorite programming font and have been using it for several years.
drewlesueur 3y ago
I like this font. The large x-height is nice for small sizes. Yea large x-height has drawbacks but it's nice to have this option. I like the squareish appearance too. Also the lines feel like they could have been drawn with a pencil or engraving tool, which looks cool to me. Thanks for the font. It's been one of my favorites lately.
- rubjo 3y ago
  Thank you for trying it out, and for sober and positive feedback :)
jug 3y ago
Due to the garguantuan font size on the page, I couldn't resize the page down to my typical programming font size. It was larger than that even at 30% zoom level and that's the minimum on Firefox. It's pointless to have a demo if I can't check how the font would look like on a desktop computer. Edit: Oh, now I get it. It's upscaled the larger the browser window size is. I understand this from an adaptive design perspective but I don't think it's optimal in this case. It becomes huge if you sit with a 27" monitor, which is a rather normal monitor size for programming.
gnarlouse 3y ago
Fonts have become such a fetish, it's weird.
- ssgodderidge 3y ago
  I mean, why do we wear the clothes we do? Why not other clothes? Why do we choose the art we collect? Why do some people care about art, and some don't? Why do we follow the sports? Why do some people follow football while others care about cricket? Different people care about different things. Why should we judge what people care about?
  - gnarlouse 3y ago
    > I mean, why do we wear the clothes we do? Why not other clothes? Why do we choose the art we collect? Why do some people care about art, and some don't? Why do we follow the sports? Why do some people follow football while others care about cricket? Different people care about different things. Why should we judge what people care about? Because fonts have become fetishized, and in my opinion, it’s weird.
  - rubjo 3y ago
    This comment is almost too intelligent to be posted here, but I really enjoyed it.
KerrAvon 3y ago
A typeface designed for programming should have _very_ visually distinct bracket and parentheses {([])} characters. Intel’s new typeface and the GitHub family that was just released both do this very well. I’d advise the Victor Mono author to take a look at how those fonts do it.
- rubjo 3y ago
  Yeah I’ve seen them, absolutely beautiful fonts. In the end everything is a compromise between many things :)
Avlin67 3y ago
I suggest Ego Mono Typeface
theandrewbailey 3y ago
> We're sorry but Victor Mono doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue. Considering what the world has come to, I'm not at all surprised that a font needs javascript.
mgaunard 3y ago
I still haven't found anything better than Courier New. I'd like to; there are many ambiguities with that font. But this Victor Mono is not the one for me.
- doubloon 3y ago
  it's weird how much i love the fonts from my childhood. these new fonts are cool but i dont have that weird emotional connection
amelius 3y ago
All these new typefaces ... I think it is time for a new keyboard design to make use of those cool Unicode codepages. I see so many symbols that would be great to have in new programming languages but somehow we're stuck with ASCII and I think keyboards are the culprit.
- billyjmc 3y ago
  Julia has made symbol input manageable and lets you define infix operators for many of the Unicode symbols that make sense for that. [1] And JuliaMono was designed to support the symbols that Julia does. [2] I generally do quite fine with my Compose Key configuration, though (even on Windows, where I use WinCompose). [3] [1]: https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/unicode-input/ https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/unicode-input/ [2]: https://juliamono.netlify.app/ https://juliamono.netlify.app/ [3]: https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose

208 points by jbverschoor 3y ago

This is one of my favourite fonts. Used to switch between it and Pragmata Pro before I got myself Berkeley Mono.

It's not as nice as Iosevka, but it's up there on my list of monospaced coding typefaces for graphical editors. (Terminals need chunky bitmap fonts, the Atari ST hi-res mono font being a particular favorite of mine.)

fsck_init 3y ago

“Old but sane potus” in the ex screenshot is just pure cringe

fictorial 3y ago

I've used Victor Mono in the past and cannot say I enjoy it because of the X-height but this is subjective of course. I am a big fan of HackGen Console NF which flies under the radar. https://github.com/yuru7/HackGen https://github.com/yuru7/HackGen or brew install font-hackgen-nerd

xolve 3y ago

I actually like Victor Mono. Ligatures, italics and cursive comments are my favorite features. It helps me to visually classify different sections of code, without being dependent on just colour of the text (I find current code themes already way too colourful!).

kurtextrem 3y ago

been using for longer now and I still love it the most. Might try Ghost from Vercel, or GHs latest font to compare, but every other mono font didn't come close to the italics and general style

saikatsg 3y ago
Ghost -> Geist
exusn 3y ago
If you like denser fonts like Victor, I would also recommend checking out Iosevka. It's similar, but to me it feels a bit nicer.
- hh_throwaway385 3y ago
  Victor Mono is one of my top fonts, specially because I like to use tiny sizes + a bit condensed to get some extra columns. Iosevka becomes illegible under the same size, so despite being more condensed, Victor still wins for me.

karmakaze 3y ago

Sorry but that script 'true' doesn't belong in a programming font--monospace only.

eropple 3y ago
Monospace/proportional is orthogonal to roman/italic; that italic 'true' is still monospace. They do have an oblique variant instead of italic, though.
- karmakaze 3y ago
  Yes, I meant it's a 'monospace (font) only' and not a programming font.
rubjo 3y ago
I have Booleans in italic (blasphemy!) :D and find it is immediately recognizeable that they are spelt correctly when the editor formats them that way. YMMV.
- karmakaze 3y ago
  I have no problem with italics. What I object to is one that appears cursive (script) and calls itself a programming font.

mizudashi 3y ago

Does anyone know where the use of cursive-style characters in monospace fonts originated from? (My guess would be that it came from something like Operator Mono from Hoefler & Co.) I've always found the cursive to be a little jarring, since the cursive characters usually look so different from the normal ones, and switching between cursive and normal styles makes it slower for me to visually parse a section of code. I always thought that was an odd choice given that many folks seem to highly value legibility and immediate character recognition when they pick a monospace font.

naikrovek 3y ago
First place I saw it was Operator Mono. I think we place a bit too much weight on how much font matter, but then again, I couldn't find one I liked, so I made my own, so who knows.
- timeon 3y ago
  > I think we place a bit too much weight on how much font matter Are you expecting us to believe you when you had to create your own font?
doubloon 3y ago
IBM had a cursive font for typewriters
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Yup, IBM Selectric Scribe (towards the bottom of the page): http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-44934.html http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-44934.html It was a bit of a "novelty" font for typewriters. Almost like the Comic Sans of its day. It wasn't meant to be used as italics, it was for typing a fun invitation or more "personal" letter or something like that. I can't find any information on it specifically though, whether it was the first. It wouldn't surprise me if it were, however.
  - rntz 3y ago

jihadjihad 3y ago

This looks nice and clean, I like it. I'll give it a shot and do the Pepsi challenge against my current favorite, JetBrains Mono [0]. I also like the play on Hamburgevons [1] for the examples--one of them is OldButSanePotus. 0: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburgevons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburgevons

JKCalhoun 3y ago
Ha ha, I have so many mono fonts now. I guess it comes from spending as much time on HN...
PKop 3y ago
You can compare using their tool if you scroll down that page. I also use Jetbrains Mono. A cursory comparison seems like Jetbrains is clearer. Look at $, but also other characters.
rubjo 3y ago
Ha ha good catch ;)

jbverschoor 3y ago

I personally removed the Italics, so that the Oblique style is used for comments (had to alter some preferences for that). The italics are hard to read when the size is small. But I'm loving the font face. Super clear.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hakunin 3y ago

Been using this font for a while, but ultimately ended up switching back to Input Mono Condensed. It’s similar, but looks neater to me. And no cursive.

doubloon 3y ago

Impressive. Let's see Paul Allen's mono.

kinduff 3y ago
I'm amazed that my brain was able to read this in the voice right from the first word.

notnmeyer 3y ago

i like cursive italics—they make me feel fancy. i’ve been using dank mono for a bit now and have been enjoying it. going to give this a try!

crazygringo 3y ago

I'm generally pretty supportive of new typefaces, but this one strikes me as... not very legible. The x-height is so uncommonly high it makes it genuinely difficult to distinguish between uppercase/ascending and lowercase letters at a glance (e.g. 'U' vs 'u', or 'h' vs. 'n'), and similarly the descender is so tiny it makes it hard to distinguish certain letters at a glance (e.g. 'q' vs 'p'). The whole point of large-enough ascenders and descenders is to recognize the shapes of whole words before looking at their letters, which these dimensions destroy. The extremely square aspect of rounded segments similarly makes them harder to distinguish from straight segments at a glance (e.g. 'U' vs 'O' are far more similar than you want for legibility). Not to mention, italic cursive is particularly difficult to read. Handwritten-style cursive was never designed for legibility -- it was designed for speed in writing. Adopting it in a body-text typeface meant for reading adds work for the reader to decipher it. I don't want to be so negative, but typeface design has certain principles that the creator is simply ignoring. They're not arbitrary or aesthetic, but rather are directly about functional legibility. At the end of the day, this typeface goes out of its way to be surprisingly difficult to read. You can read it, but it simply takes more effort. Which is generally the last thing you want in a typeface for coding (or anything body text).

johnsillings 3y ago
Same reaction here. Legibility is below-average, and I don't love the look & feel either.
- rubjo 3y ago
  That’s ok, thank you for having a look!
mikeortman 3y ago
[flagged]
- rob74 3y ago
  Being supportive of new typefaces doesn't mean you have to like everything you see? Personally, I'm biased because I prefer the "good old" typewriter-style monospace fonts with serifs, which already eliminates around 90% of "programming fonts". My current favorite (not only for Go) is Go Mono (https://go.dev/blog/go-fonts https://go.dev/blog/go-fonts).

RadiozRadioz 3y ago

Sorry, ligatures are not for me. I don't get it. Why would you ever want symbols to collapse like that in a functional monospace font? Just looks like a bunch of funky unicode characters peppered throughout my source. And my caret can travel _inside_ one of these special marks? No thanks.

nurettin 3y ago
Do you also care about inverted scroll and dark/light themes? None of it matters.
politelemon 3y ago
I sometimes feels there's now a race between typefacers to stuff as many ligatures as possible to the point that it's bordering in indecipherability and clownishness. There's definitely an audience for this though, else why would they do it.
- chalsprhebaodu 3y ago
  Have you considered that it’s not indecipherable or clownish and perhaps you are a part of a group that just doesn’t get it?
  - eyelidlessness 3y ago
    Not OP, but that’s my conclusion. I also don’t like programming font ligatures, but I personally find it annoying when people who share my opinion feel the need to point it out in a discussion of fonts clearly designed for people who don’t share my opinion. It’s highly subjective and the prevalence of these ligatures has never been a huge burden for me, because fonts without them are rather prevalent as well, as are means to bypass them in my own use.
    - nrabulinski 3y ago
      And you can use the font with ligatures disabled! Almost as if having ligatures was a preference that doesn’t influence those who don’t want them yet may convince someone who does to try out font X :)

stayux 3y ago

Try this: https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts https://github.com/iaolo/iA-Fonts Thank me later:) Context: https://ia.net/topics/in-search-of-the-perfect-writing-font https://ia.net/topics/in-search-of-the-perfect-writing-font

agent327 3y ago

Give me Liberty Mono or give me death! No wait, it's called "Liberation Mono". But it's still a great font for coding. https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/liberation-mono https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/liberation-mono

benrutter 3y ago

I'm curious, does anybody else change their terminal/editor font about once every two months only to immediately decide."no I don't like change" and go back to their standard? (In my case JetBrains Mono) I'd don't know if it's that I genuinely prefer that font, or just that I've spent so long looking at it my brain can't handle anything else.

marginalia_nu 3y ago
I tried a bunch, wasn't quite happy until I found Comic Mono. It's unironically is the superior programming font if you have dyslexia. Makes an enormous difference in my reading speed.
- starkparker 3y ago
  Interestingly, it might not be the Comic Sans of it that helps.[1] If your editor or terminal has the option, increasing the tracking/space between letters in any sans-serif font can help with letter-flipping issues. Disclaimer: I'm both mildly dyslexic and a more severe letter-flipper/mirror-writer (visual processing issues)[2] since childhood 1: https://www.boia.org/blog/does-comic-sans-benefit-people-with-dyslexia https://www.boia.org/blog/does-comic-sans-benefit-people-wit... 2: https://www.understood.org/en/articles/faqs-about-reversing-letters-writing-letters-backwards-and-dyslexia https://www.understood.org/en/articles/faqs-about-reversing-...
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    It's literally the only font that has this effect on my reading I've found, seems to be something with the letter shapes. It basically feels like putting on prescription glasses, suddenly all the text becomes ten times more legible. Playing with the spacing of another font doesn't seem to have a similar effect. Although I'm open to the fact that there's probably a whole spectrum of different processing disorders that fly under the banner of dyslexia, so mileage may definitely vary.
ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
Just happened to me too, I've tried some I found at https://www.programmingfonts.org/ https://www.programmingfonts.org/. I again returned to using Hasklig - Source Code pro with Ligatures - in the editor.

_hao 3y ago

Yuck. Definitely not for me. I'll stick with Inconsolata.

ssgodderidge 3y ago

Awesome font, but not for me. The kerning is just too small for a text editor for my eyes. I bet others would like it. The side-by-side comparison tool with different fonts is AMAZING. Major props to the designer. Every font site should do that. I loved immediately comparing the font vs my current font _in browser_, without downloading any files.

rubjo 3y ago
Glad you liked the compare view :) Yeah, I know it’s a bit compressed, that’s the way I prefer it though.

ssgodderidge 3y ago

Same discussion from 2019 on this page here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21366412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21366412

kevin_thibedeau 3y ago

Needs an alternate cursive glyph for italic 'r' at the start of a word. Probably others too.

liveoneggs 3y ago

dang that website is fancy

amir734jj 3y ago

This is unrelated ... is it just me but I have been in love with Monaco, I can't use anything else.

mike986 3y ago

It's amazing we have so many high quality open source fonts / independent effort working on them nowadays. Also a big fan of condensed mono fonts Oreilly used to use "The Sans Mono Condensed" which is amazing. Other favorites of mine: PragmataPro (paid), Iosevka Comfy Fixed , M Plus 50 (free). Anyone has other recommendation for good condensed fonts ? (Especially Serif / Sans)

xwowsersx 3y ago

Cool typeface, but pretty illegible to me (I realize this is very personal). I don't think my eyes could handle this for more than a few minutes. That's the thing about typefaces — there are typefaces that are far "prettier" and more interesting than the ones I use, but they don't scale in the sense that they just can't be used as your daily driver. Good typefaces for all day programming strike a balance between style, legibility and "plainness" that makes them suitable for staring at all day every day.

benvds 3y ago

I've been using it for months and I love everything about it. Thanks Rubjo!

rubjo 3y ago
You’re very welcome, it’s a joy to hear that it works for others as well :)

amelius 3y ago

Big fan of Iosevka Term Regular for programming. The condensed font takes a day or two to get used to, but it gives you a lot of extra screen space. https://typeof.net/Iosevka/ https://typeof.net/Iosevka/

rubjo 3y ago
Iosevka is such a nice font, ever-evolving, and surely what I would have used if I hadn’t enjoyed Victor Mono more :)
- amelius 3y ago
  Like I said, it takes a little time/effort to fully appreciate it! ;)

zare_st 3y ago

I don't dislike this font visually but it needs a lot of work. How I approach "reviewing" monospace fonts is whether I would immediately or eventually change them if they came as default. Monospace fonts that come with default KDE for instance are passable and I'll change them eventually. If this font was default to anywhere I'd change it immediately. Using an explicit "human style" for comments implies that the code belongs to the "machine"? Humans wrote everything. The italics font is useless for programming. If I compare it to any standard fonts in the box below on site I can notice A) higher glyphs B) cartoony comments. And that's it.

jojohohanon 3y ago

Obl: everytime we do a font thread, I ask if anyone knows a font that is * proportional * sans * has programming ligatures * clearly differentiates 1l and 0O The closest I’ve come was iosevka. But it was not quite proportional and I wasn’t font of its looks.

toastal 3y ago
Iosevka’s customizations are a gem. I can ‘fix’ the things I dislike about it with ease.

codedokode 3y ago

The page uses too large font size for code examples. It is easy to look good at a large size. I advise to set page zoom to 70% or less before comparing font legibility.

sebastianconcpt 3y ago

Lovely quality. I celebrate that. Ligatures are a deal breaker for me tho. With centuries of use cases, we crafted an alphabet that abstracted phonemes, one per symbol, in a carefully isolated, unambiguous and successful way. Ligatures come and with a stroke of design creativity inject ambiguity and de-standardisation where those problems were previously carefully solved.

toastal 3y ago
I dislike them too, but they can be disabled. This makes them ‘good’ for remote pair with something like upterm so two users that disagree on the subject can have it their way. Inappropriate usage is rampant making presentations & in-person pairing way more difficult/unclear (luckily userStyles can be used to prevent it in the browser). What we need is languages to stop clinging to US keyboards as a limiter where => doesn’t need to be misunderstood as ⇒ or ≥.
kstrauser 3y ago
Ligatures overcome the typographic limitations we've had since ASCII came along. For example -> became a convention because we didn't have a way to write → easily. Now we do.
- sebastianconcpt 3y ago
  Is not standard and, as I said, creates ambiguity and additional cognitive load for a weak reason.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    …for you. Be careful when you state personal opinion as fact. I’m not claiming that they’re universally good, just that I like them (and so do lots of other people). Your claims are far from universal.
    - sebastianconcpt 3y ago
      But notice is not an opinion that most fonts you see everywhere are not using ligatures. They are a subset which is the opposite of being universally adopted as norm. Which is the point I'm raising: The norm expects you to unambiguously interpret certain symbols and ligatures dilutes that normal convenience to read symbols unambiguously. Your brain acquired a taste to adjust the parsing of these symbols, that taste isn't universal nor is it the norm.

nrml_amnt 3y ago

Beautiful website (mobile). Beautiful font. Although I must agree that it’s not as legible as Fira or Ubuntu in an editor, I would certainly consider this font for aesthetic purposes for presentation, etc. It looks fantastic on your site.

ajross 3y ago

> I'm generally pretty supportive of new typefaces I guess I am in the abstract, but... no, I guess I'm more "bewildered" by new typefaces. Especially mono fonts targetted at source code display. I mean, this world just doesn't have elaborate requirements. And it was solved, like, dead-on-done-to-perfection with the open source release of Bitstream Vera two decades ago. I haven't wanted a new font since. Frankly I can barely tell the difference between most of them (not this one though -- yikes, that cursive thing is weird). I mean, why? Why not spend your font design hours making something for general text that people might notice. Hackers are poor discriminators and frankly very well served already.

amai 3y ago

See also https://www.codingfont.com/ https://www.codingfont.com/ and https://www.programmingfonts.org/ https://www.programmingfonts.org/

rednafi 3y ago

JetBrains Mono says invictus maneo

idbehold 3y ago

I wish we could get a new HN guideline to not make comments for or against ligatures in monospaced fonts. You're not going to convince anyone.

rubjo 3y ago
Are you implying that no one ever changes their opinions in discussions on the Internet? :D

thm 3y ago

PragmataPro for life.

redder23 3y ago

Don't like it, looks to stretched vertically, not easy to read, especially having seen Berkeley Mono here today that looks super nice.

Zetobal 3y ago

There were a lot of monospace font postings in the last week and they all had some novelty but this one is horrid and from a typographer standpoint - badly executed.

L0stLink 3y ago

Though ligatures when I first saw them looked really cool but trying them out I quickly realized how much I hated actually reading and writing code with them turned on. Cursive has also been an odd choice for monospace fonts to me, I don't like how they break the expected uniformity of the monospace text. Varying font weight, color and using italics has always been enough for me.

0xblinq 3y ago

horrible

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

Crossbars on the capital "i": CHECK A zero that's distinguishable from an O: CHECK So this thing is free of the two most-common mistakes in font design.

x3n0ph3n3 3y ago

This is my favorite programming font and have been using it for several years.

drewlesueur 3y ago

I like this font. The large x-height is nice for small sizes. Yea large x-height has drawbacks but it's nice to have this option. I like the squareish appearance too. Also the lines feel like they could have been drawn with a pencil or engraving tool, which looks cool to me. Thanks for the font. It's been one of my favorites lately.

rubjo 3y ago
Thank you for trying it out, and for sober and positive feedback :)

jug 3y ago

Due to the garguantuan font size on the page, I couldn't resize the page down to my typical programming font size. It was larger than that even at 30% zoom level and that's the minimum on Firefox. It's pointless to have a demo if I can't check how the font would look like on a desktop computer. Edit: Oh, now I get it. It's upscaled the larger the browser window size is. I understand this from an adaptive design perspective but I don't think it's optimal in this case. It becomes huge if you sit with a 27" monitor, which is a rather normal monitor size for programming.

gnarlouse 3y ago

Fonts have become such a fetish, it's weird.

ssgodderidge 3y ago
I mean, why do we wear the clothes we do? Why not other clothes? Why do we choose the art we collect? Why do some people care about art, and some don't? Why do we follow the sports? Why do some people follow football while others care about cricket? Different people care about different things. Why should we judge what people care about?
- gnarlouse 3y ago
  > I mean, why do we wear the clothes we do? Why not other clothes? Why do we choose the art we collect? Why do some people care about art, and some don't? Why do we follow the sports? Why do some people follow football while others care about cricket? Different people care about different things. Why should we judge what people care about? Because fonts have become fetishized, and in my opinion, it’s weird.
- rubjo 3y ago
  This comment is almost too intelligent to be posted here, but I really enjoyed it.

KerrAvon 3y ago

A typeface designed for programming should have _very_ visually distinct bracket and parentheses {([])} characters. Intel’s new typeface and the GitHub family that was just released both do this very well. I’d advise the Victor Mono author to take a look at how those fonts do it.

rubjo 3y ago
Yeah I’ve seen them, absolutely beautiful fonts. In the end everything is a compromise between many things :)

Avlin67 3y ago

I suggest Ego Mono Typeface

theandrewbailey 3y ago

> We're sorry but Victor Mono doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue. Considering what the world has come to, I'm not at all surprised that a font needs javascript.

mgaunard 3y ago

I still haven't found anything better than Courier New. I'd like to; there are many ambiguities with that font. But this Victor Mono is not the one for me.

doubloon 3y ago
it's weird how much i love the fonts from my childhood. these new fonts are cool but i dont have that weird emotional connection

amelius 3y ago

All these new typefaces ... I think it is time for a new keyboard design to make use of those cool Unicode codepages. I see so many symbols that would be great to have in new programming languages but somehow we're stuck with ASCII and I think keyboards are the culprit.

billyjmc 3y ago
Julia has made symbol input manageable and lets you define infix operators for many of the Unicode symbols that make sense for that. [1] And JuliaMono was designed to support the symbols that Julia does. [2] I generally do quite fine with my Compose Key configuration, though (even on Windows, where I use WinCompose). [3] [1]: https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/unicode-input/ https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/unicode-input/ [2]: https://juliamono.netlify.app/ https://juliamono.netlify.app/ [3]: https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose