11 ms·

I wandered the internet for years looking for the perfect monospace font for me. There was never anything that fit; Ubuntu Mono was nice but a bit too "unprofe

I wandered the internet for years looking for the perfect monospace font for me. There was never anything that fit; Ubuntu Mono was nice but a bit too "unprofessional", Liberation/Droid too boring, Microsoft/Apple fonts didn't fit either. I looked through so many font comparison sites, tried a whole bunch, just ended up sticking with the defaults. Then I found Fira Mono. I use it everywhere. It looks great; it's very clear and easy to read, it has a nice style. Fonts are a very personal thing so thanks to Mozilla for finally letting me have one that was "mine".

lygaret 12y ago
Totally agree. I _really_ wish there was an italic variant; that would pretty much guarantee it'd be the only monospace I use again.
hornetblack 12y ago
I'm still comparing Fira Mono and Source Code Pro. They are both very nice. https://github.com/adobe/source-code-pro https://github.com/adobe/source-code-pro
- temporary_art 12y ago
  I'm a huge fan of Anonymous Pro... If you want to compare with something else. http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro
- Demiurge 12y ago
  Source Code Pro Light is the only code/terminal font I can use on OSX without being mad about the fatty rendering! It's perfect!
- buddystiff 12y ago
  You could only truly compare Source Code Pro if the designer made Fira Sans Mono. I wonder if he has? That'd fix the lowercase r problem, I would think.
seanmcdirmid 12y ago
Go proportionally spaced fonts for code and don't look back.
- ANTSANTS 12y ago
  Let me know how that works for you if you ever write Lisp, Haskell, or have to deal with someone who thought they could make their $ALGOL_INSPIRED_LANGUAGE look cute by aligning everything into tables.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Mono space is a type writer anachronism. Lisp was designed in hype 60s and not many people write code in it; Haskell could benefit from better mathematical typesetting. I've heard that going proportional would be bad, but I made the switch and have noticed yet any badly formatted third party code (I mostly use C#).
    - edwintorok 12y ago
      Are you using a serif font? Because sans-serif is very bad when it comes to representing source code: the characters 1lI and 0O all look alike. For example Pidgin's choice of a sans-serif font always caused me troubles, had to either switch the font, or the system-wide sans-serif font to something where I can tell the difference.
      - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
        Segoe UI. Honestly, I knew this would be a problem but I haven't had this problem yet. The most annoying thing is that subtraction (-) is too short in relation to addition (+).
        Silhouette 12y ago
        In my ideal world, code would be typeset in proportional fonts, with mathematically appropriate glyphs chosen from a font with a comprehensive Unicode character set, including a proper minus instead of hyphen-minus. The usual problems with this are arranging indentations/alignments neatly where you really do want them and avoiding an explosion of funny characters once you've got a large part of the Unicode character set to play with. Tools are pretty good at the first these days, but pity the poor Haskell developers if we don't fix the second. People will be writing logging libraries that use different levels of emoticon to save writing 'debug' and 'error'...
Svip 12y ago
Strange your list seems to be lacking DejaVu Mono. Just never came about it? Not that I dislike your final choice of Fira Mono. But I always thought DejaVu Mono was the best monospaced typeface out there for years.
- joosters 12y ago
  Same here, DejaVu Mono in my terminal. Just tried the Fira Mono and it is OK but the line spacing seems far too big for my taste.
  - noir_lord 12y ago
    on xfce4-term the linespacing looks about 1.5 compared to Droid sans Mono. Costs to many lines on screen, nice font though.
    - middleclick 12y ago
      I have the same issue. A sad thing, the font looks good but the line spacing is way too much for my taste.
      - georgevreilly 12y ago
        Download Fira Mono OT from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=897009#c64 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=897009#c64, and you'll get 30% more lines.
- broodbucket 12y ago
  It didn't come to mind but I do like DejaVu, just not a huge amount. It was typically the pick of the pre-installed for sure.
Monkeyget 12y ago
Fira Mono takes an awful lot of vertical space. To me it looks like inconsolata but less legible due to extra serif.
- buddystiff 12y ago
  I kinda like it. It forces a comfortable min line height that makes it very readable. However, upon further investigation it breaks readability of text in menus/lists that have max height shorter than the expected standard fonts line height. Hence cutting off the text... huge bummer. Oh well, back to uncomfortably dense fonts :(
- alxndr 12y ago
  After reading a few shell scripts in Fira Mono, I find the serif on the lowercase "r" very distracting compared to Inconsolata. The lowercase "i" too, even though it looks very similar to Inconsolata's lowercase "i". Also, for some reason I find the dot in the number "0" to be more distracting than using a slash to distinguish it from an uppercase "O".
lomnakkus 12y ago
Another font which is very nice for code IMO is Fantasque[0,1]. It's a lot less "rigid" than most other monospace fonts, but after some use I actually found that it helps readability overall. [0] http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/fantasque-sans-mono http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/fantasque-sans-mono [1] https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans
- sogen 12y ago
  Wow, great find man, Fantastique!
- rhizome 12y ago
  that looped lowercase-k is awful
cmyr 12y ago
I'm a big big fan of Bistream Vera Sans Mono. It walks the line between being humane and being rigorous quite well, in my opinion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Vera http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Vera
calinet6 12y ago
Monaco has always been excellent for me.
Zardoz84 12y ago
Do you try Hermit font ? Made by a programer for programers.

lygaret 12y ago

Totally agree. I _really_ wish there was an italic variant; that would pretty much guarantee it'd be the only monospace I use again.

hornetblack 12y ago

I'm still comparing Fira Mono and Source Code Pro. They are both very nice. https://github.com/adobe/source-code-pro https://github.com/adobe/source-code-pro

temporary_art 12y ago
I'm a huge fan of Anonymous Pro... If you want to compare with something else. http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro
Demiurge 12y ago
Source Code Pro Light is the only code/terminal font I can use on OSX without being mad about the fatty rendering! It's perfect!
buddystiff 12y ago
You could only truly compare Source Code Pro if the designer made Fira Sans Mono. I wonder if he has? That'd fix the lowercase r problem, I would think.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago

Go proportionally spaced fonts for code and don't look back.

ANTSANTS 12y ago
Let me know how that works for you if you ever write Lisp, Haskell, or have to deal with someone who thought they could make their $ALGOL_INSPIRED_LANGUAGE look cute by aligning everything into tables.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Mono space is a type writer anachronism. Lisp was designed in hype 60s and not many people write code in it; Haskell could benefit from better mathematical typesetting. I've heard that going proportional would be bad, but I made the switch and have noticed yet any badly formatted third party code (I mostly use C#).
  - edwintorok 12y ago
    Are you using a serif font? Because sans-serif is very bad when it comes to representing source code: the characters 1lI and 0O all look alike. For example Pidgin's choice of a sans-serif font always caused me troubles, had to either switch the font, or the system-wide sans-serif font to something where I can tell the difference.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      Segoe UI. Honestly, I knew this would be a problem but I haven't had this problem yet. The most annoying thing is that subtraction (-) is too short in relation to addition (+).
      - Silhouette 12y ago
        In my ideal world, code would be typeset in proportional fonts, with mathematically appropriate glyphs chosen from a font with a comprehensive Unicode character set, including a proper minus instead of hyphen-minus. The usual problems with this are arranging indentations/alignments neatly where you really do want them and avoiding an explosion of funny characters once you've got a large part of the Unicode character set to play with. Tools are pretty good at the first these days, but pity the poor Haskell developers if we don't fix the second. People will be writing logging libraries that use different levels of emoticon to save writing 'debug' and 'error'...

Svip 12y ago

Strange your list seems to be lacking DejaVu Mono. Just never came about it? Not that I dislike your final choice of Fira Mono. But I always thought DejaVu Mono was the best monospaced typeface out there for years.

joosters 12y ago
Same here, DejaVu Mono in my terminal. Just tried the Fira Mono and it is OK but the line spacing seems far too big for my taste.
- noir_lord 12y ago
  on xfce4-term the linespacing looks about 1.5 compared to Droid sans Mono. Costs to many lines on screen, nice font though.
  - middleclick 12y ago
    I have the same issue. A sad thing, the font looks good but the line spacing is way too much for my taste.
    - georgevreilly 12y ago
      Download Fira Mono OT from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=897009#c64 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=897009#c64, and you'll get 30% more lines.
broodbucket 12y ago
It didn't come to mind but I do like DejaVu, just not a huge amount. It was typically the pick of the pre-installed for sure.

Monkeyget 12y ago

Fira Mono takes an awful lot of vertical space. To me it looks like inconsolata but less legible due to extra serif.

buddystiff 12y ago
I kinda like it. It forces a comfortable min line height that makes it very readable. However, upon further investigation it breaks readability of text in menus/lists that have max height shorter than the expected standard fonts line height. Hence cutting off the text... huge bummer. Oh well, back to uncomfortably dense fonts :(
alxndr 12y ago
After reading a few shell scripts in Fira Mono, I find the serif on the lowercase "r" very distracting compared to Inconsolata. The lowercase "i" too, even though it looks very similar to Inconsolata's lowercase "i". Also, for some reason I find the dot in the number "0" to be more distracting than using a slash to distinguish it from an uppercase "O".

lomnakkus 12y ago

Another font which is very nice for code IMO is Fantasque[0,1]. It's a lot less "rigid" than most other monospace fonts, but after some use I actually found that it helps readability overall. [0] http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/fantasque-sans-mono http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/fantasque-sans-mono [1] https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans

sogen 12y ago
Wow, great find man, Fantastique!
rhizome 12y ago
that looped lowercase-k is awful

cmyr 12y ago

I'm a big big fan of Bistream Vera Sans Mono. It walks the line between being humane and being rigorous quite well, in my opinion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Vera http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Vera

calinet6 12y ago

Monaco has always been excellent for me.

Zardoz84 12y ago

Do you try Hermit font ? Made by a programer for programers.