One of the things you end up with when you spend too much time reading Hacker News is a folder of very slick monospaced fonts designed for code editors. Are any of these fonts measurably better than whatever’s already installed on your system? Nope! Here’s my list.
Spark by After the Flood
This one is kind of a gimmick, but an incredibly clever one. It translates sequences of characters like 123{30,60,90}456 into spark lines, using some fancy features of the OTF format. See also their source code repository for the project. I haven’t used this nearly enough to tell if it works well in practice, but I will now be on the constant lookout for use cases.
Consolas by Luc(as) de Groot for Microsoft
In the early 2000s Microsoft realized that the set of default fonts their Office suite used looked extremely dated and commissioned the triumvirate of Cambria (serif), Calibri (sans), and Consolas (mono), and as frustrating as the Office suite, these three fonts are all pretty great. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to “get” Consolas, but it’s available already if you’ve installed Office, and for example in the Google suite as well nowadays.
Insonsolata by Ralph Levien
This one is a pretty popular, solid choice whose design was inspired by Consolas (among others). Levien released it under an open-source license, which has probably contributed to its popularity. A couple of downsides are that it’s only available in two weights (regular and bold) and it only covers the basic Latin character set. (There’s another version of it called Inconsolata Hellenic that adds Greek.) I used it for a heck of a long time though. See also
I’m not really sure who created this project, but it’s also fully open source and openly licensed. You get the standard upright, bold, oblique, bold oblique styles, and the glyph coverage looks pretty good. I haven’t tried it extensively yet.
Iosevka by Belleve Invis
I’m guessing on that byline, based on the copyright notice from the homepage. See also the source code repository. From its description:
Iosevka is a slender monospace sans-serif and slab-serif typeface inspired by Pragmata Pro, M+ and PF DIN Mono, designed to be the ideal font for programming.
This is my current favorite, for a few reasons:
- It is extremely narrow. In my current job, I spend a lot of time logged in to servers running
tmuxsessions with lots of panes open, and, as silly as this is, using a narrow font makes it much more pleasant to do this kind of work on a laptop screen. - Coverage. Hits Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and many, many technical symbols and glyphs.
- Styles. You get both a regular monospace and a slab serif, and for each family you get upgright, oblique, italic, and like five different weights. (Admittedly, the difference between italic and oblique is pretty hard to spot.)
- Open source license, and the font files are generated from code.
- Ridiculous, pointless, super, super slick ligatures for progamming languages. I mean, not for, like C. But if you’re slinging code in Idris or Coq, you should definitely check out the examples on the homepage.
Input by David Jonathan Ross for the Font Bureau
The most recent addition to the list. (So far.) This one is commercially licensed, but free for personal use. In terms of glyph coverage, it looks to be pretty good but probably not as extensive as Iosevka. The selling point is variety: you get a mono, a sans, and a (slab) serif, each very attractive, and for each you get regular, narrow, condensed, and compressed widths along with a range of weights and italics. It‘s comprehensive.