I've been using a custom version - you can customize the font¹ and build your own ttf (or better yet, ttc) using the build system supplied in the repository².
be5invis, the author of the font, deserves a special mention for creating a whole custom DSL called PatEL (Parametric Type Expression Language) to generate the font programmatically!
Renzhi, if you ever come around to read this, thank you so much for Iosevka, man!
I am happy it works for you. I am always surprised how much this font is praised, then I try it, and just completely unreadable for me.
I tried it again, quickly set it up in my terminal the "Iosevka Term" version, switching from Jetbrains Mono, and just don't understand how can people read this.
I drove a version of this for a fairly long time, remembering downloading it from GitHub page, not from the customizer. It's not a bad font by any means. I enjoyed Iosevka a lot while I used it.
But, after using Berkeley Mono for three minutes, I switched to it everywhere in a week or so, and never looked back, or looked anywhere else, to be precise.
Yes, it's not free, and yes it's opinionated. I can say that my opinions align with that font pretty much. It's one of the things which I cherish like an expensive hand tool which really does its job very well and makes you happy with its presence.
Funny enough I paid for Berkeley Mono but its italic is just not up to it (and particularly not to the price). Iosevka Mono has very nice glyphs but just way too narrow for my taste. JetBrains Mono, IBM Plex Mono (or Lilex) or Roboto Mono just seem to work much better for my tired eyes !
It's designed to look like a font from that era, to be honest. It also reminds me some of the older computers I used. Some typewriter, maybe a real VT320 or the older DOS systems I used.
It's a modern yet period correct version of these older fonts, with proper character set support and love for details. It's so perfect for me, it becomes invisible, or as the Berkeley's page says: "It's boring. It's good"*.
Or as I mailed the creator after using it a couple of weeks: "It's so perfect that it transported all my computers to 70s, in a good way".
*: When I was writing this comment, I wondered whether I really set my browser's monospace font to Berkeley. It becomes that transparent after a while.
If you like Berkeley Mono but don't want to pay, here's an Iosevka configuration that attempts to mimic it as closely as possible. https://ahatem.github.io/IoskeleyMono/
The reason it's so popular is it was (one of?) the first fonts to include tons of programming ligatures. So it gained mindshare early, and since font choices are so personal, the more people use a font, the more people will like and post about it.
To suggest an odd thing, you might try repeating your tests with the customized set to a single weight — either higher or lower than the default 500 that most programs would use. Berkeley for high-PPI displays is at 450 rather than 500 and looks better for it. (I’m on the Berkeley ship and there are flaws in Iosevka that would see me select Monaco over it, but I’m also a fan of For Science™.)
Once, I also couldn't fathom how people liked this one.
When I asked, somebody said it fits more characters in terminals and code editors. This sounds incredibly obvious, but for whatever reason that was eye-opening for me and helped me appreciate it a lot more when I tried it again. Now I can't use anything else.
Iosevka is very configurable and have many options for font and individual glyphs.
Build supports text file config.
At some point I made a config so I can always get preferred setup. It works well for me
I'm also not a fan of the narrow width, but there is an "extended" width version that's more like other mono fonts, which is what I personally use, albeit customized.
Yep. :waves: to ones on similar path.. Switching off from Terminus was hard, but eventually unavoidable. Switched to Jetbrains Mono when Ghostty came out nearly 2 years ago..
oh man I used Terminus for so long till my finger hurt ... recently I was very happy with Cascadia Mono but now I've migrated to (as I was saying in another thread) Pragmasevka (derivative of Iosevka that mimics Pragmata Pro). It's really great.
Is it only me but I really dislike "Code Ligations"? I have to mark some chars to count how many consecutive "=" simbols there are... or \/ looking like V without having other chars near it to distinguish. Having to copy paste diamond shape to find out it is <>. arrows with squiggly tails, /> being ugly, <. having dot in the middle...
That could be the maximum I'd like out of font to have "proper" greater/less-equal sign.
They always seemed to me like solutions to a nonexistent problem. They make the code less readable, but ligatures exist and they seemed like a cool tech thing to implement, and they might look cool in screenshots. But in practice, in my opinion, they're worse than just having the normal characters. But I guess it's a matter of opinion, no harm in other people using them.
We have studies since ages ago that consistency in code style is one of the most important requirements for code quality.
This goes down to the details like that you should either use spaces over tabs OR prescribe editor config such that the code looks similar on each machine.
Of course this doesn't automatically mean that code ligatures are harmful, but I would be quite wary of using them. At the very least it introduces some friction, not sure if the arguably lower mental load of using real mathematical symbols instead of the ASCII symbols makes up for it.
I'v been coding now for like 15 years and I'm not old enought to understand the debate between spaces vs tabs :)
I guess my IDE choices never surface the issue for me... visually they just look the same. I cannot say which codebase uses spaces which uses tabs. I never even think about it. I just smash tab character and don't care that there have been spaces. Or enter or { and IDE does the indentation. I just choose not to press space 2-4-8-16 times in a row.
Now I hope I won't get bulldozed over by HN crowd...
One of the main arguments for tabs over spaces was always that people wanted to configure how much space a level of indentation makes up on screen.
With tabs pretty much every editor except something like notepad.exe could do it since ancient times, with spaces the editor needs to do a bit more processing, so you were a bit more restricted in editor choice, if you really were bothered so much by the indents chosen in the project.
So it is actually quite similar to the ligature discussion. It would be good if the code looked the same for everybody but now instead of saying "But 8-space indents waste so much space on the screen :(" some people now go "But I don't like seeing things like != or -> instead of modern Unicode symbols :("
Spaces vs. tabs causes a lot of issues for Python programmers who share their code with other programmers. The other place where spaces vs. tabs is an issue is with makefiles, probably one of the most annoying features of POSIX.
Considering the way `/bin/sh` had a bunch of different implementations before POSIX standardization minimized that in the mid-1990s, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of those distinguished spaces from tabs.
That said, the original UNIX V7 implementation of /bin/sh didn’t distinguish different kinds of whitespace:
Well, the tabs vs spaces had been mostly resolved and spaces won. But obviously it was never about what physical keys to press, nobody on the spaces side would spam the space bar to indent stuff (except maybe in the unfortunate situations of having to use an editor with no choice of setting the tabulator to emit spaces, or a textfield in a non-editor UI where the tabulator cycles the focus instead).
It's too bad spaces won, tabs is just correct I think, since one can configure the tabstop to use any indent size they would like. I'm quite tired of reading 2-space indent. Seems everything has moved this way now except python. I'm even seeing C with it, which is especially jarring. I think the languages that use braces for indentation particularly need 4. Python needs it least, and I can read Ruby because its blocks are delimited by words and it's bad style to write long methods
I'm in the same boat, I always just press tab and let my IDE or text editor fill in with N spaces.
Granted, I'm also someone who heavily encourages the use of Black as the Python formatter in projects I'm on, specifically because it has no configurable options - can't have a holy war about formats if nothing can be changed.
I thought I was the only one! I figured I was either crazy or getting old and stuck in my ways. The first I'm I saw a font with them, I thought it was cool and tried it out. I almost immediately hated it. I've tried a few more times for varying lengths of time, and I've decided that I really do hate them.
I have used Fontforge to remove all ligatures from a programming font; e.g. my monospace font of choice is a aggressively subsetted variant of Fira Code with no ligatures whatsoever.
For example, ligatures in Fira Code cannot be disabled when using the Cygwin terminal in Windows (mintty). In that application, for example, “===” looks like three continuous long lines atop each other in Fira Code, with no way to make it look like three equal signs again.
“Fira Code is not only about ligatures. Some fine-tuning is done for punctuation and frequent letter pairs.” Note that without ligature support, a lot of that fine tuning is lost.
I wish editors had the option to disable certain ligatures. I use jetbrains mono, and the >> ligature breaks bracket highlighting in visual studio, making them both the same colour
The VT-340 didn't support ligatures, therefore, we shouldn't use them ;-)
Now, seriously, a programming font has no (and should never have) awareness of the computer language it's representing. Ligatures make sense if they present meaning in a way easier to read than the non-combined characters. I can't type := in APL and expect the REPL to think it's an attribution arrow (←).
I get APL is a rather extreme language to talk about, but this is one example where ligatures would harm the programmer (unless your editor replaces a ":=" with a "←"). Source code is a very precise language and the choice of characters you use matters a lot. A "<-" doesn't mean "←" unless the language declares so.
I personally like them because (to me) it makes a few symbols less ambiguous. (I use Victor Mono [0], so in my mind things like == and === in that font makes mistakes more obvious to me at least.)
But also... I know I have the minority opinion on this. It absolutely should be opt-in, not opt-out. I think the past decade, I've been told the font tweaks I enable are incomprehensable to everyone I work with. The way I like my IDE fonts is far outside the bell curve (ligatures, cursive variants for some syntax, proportional variants for prose) so the fact that most new monospace code-focused fonts seem to align with my opinions should be concerning to font makers! I like that I don't have to patch a different font's italics into my code font anymore, but common sense says I SHOULD still have to do that!
I wish more languages other than Raku did this. But no, not equal is written as surprised equal. And if something ought to be less or equal, you have to write a fat arrow pointing left. :/
It is aggressive in its unicode support. You want to use vulgar fractions? Or Mayan numerals? They'll work. You want to use mathematical notation like ∈? It works.
Mostly it strips out ‘math variable names that jerks would use to embolden their spam headlines for emphasis’, which is indeed annoying and results in this:
I used to hate font ligatures until I discovered Commit Mono (my all time favorite monospace font). They use the ligatures only to adjust spacing and make it look better on a monospace grid. No stupid <=, -> ligatures or anything else.
They are in the tabs vs spaces camp. Choose your preference and walk away, silently. Unless you consider yourself a Real Programmer, in that case, fight to the death about the matter.
(...I also find them annoying to look at, idk why)
Some fonts use three lines to draw a triple equals ligature. That, and it is, well, triple long. I’ve never had any problems with distinguishing anything with ligatures. They’re nice to look at, and very easy to read once you’re used to them. Skill issue, guys.
It is common knowledge among most - if not all - civilizations that you do, in fact, need to learn to read in order to know how to read.
Anyway, since you want a direct representation of the text - presumably, you configured your editor to render EOL sequences explicitly, to distinguish tabs from spaces, etc?
You and me both. Ligatures are a solution to a problem that monospaced fonts don't have. I don't mind if a mono font uses ligatures to harmonize character spacing/alignment a little bit. But I don't want things like a "proper" greater/less-equal sign; if a font goes so far as to replace >= with ≥, then it's lying to me about what characters are actually present in the file.
Code ligatures look like the final desperate attempt of an aging hipster, a Ruby on Rails and Web2.0 early adoptr (sic), the type to wear thick-rimmed fake glasses and a scarf in the middle of summer, to be cool, as he is riding his old Segway, with a glass of soy latte in one hand and an avocado toast in the other, into the void of oblivion.
I don't like them because I never know what they actually stand for in ASCII.
IMO a font specimen site may be the worst place to use font-display: swap. Was wondering why I was looking at what seemed indistinguishable from Courier, turns out what I saw was exactly Courier.
For those not in the know (or who didn't suffer through having to write CSS manually): font-display: swap changes the default behavior from "No text visible until font been loaded" to "Display fallback font until specified font is available", meaning you'll see Courier until Iosevka loaded properly, or Courier forever if the font file failed to load.
I'm guessing the website author added that after some "website performance tool" recommended it, as they make sweeping generalizations that don't always make sense in every context, and "always add font-display: swap so text is readable earlier" is now a dogmatic rule "web developers" (mechanical or wetware ones) add without thinking, so that precious performance number goes up.
I think the dogmatism stems from Google, which delivers this advice as unconditional instruction and often gets parroted, makes the main website grading tool that calls it an error, and says they’ll drive less traffic to you if their grading tool rates you poorly.
Also, I think also led by Google, `font-display: block;` actually behaves the same as swap now, just with a longer wait for the font to load [1]. Iosevka’s webpage does use swap, though.
I have a custom build of this font, use it everywhere now.
One thing is that the width by default is too compact and the extended is too wide for my taste. Upon searching I found somebody's build that has width 576. I don't know why that number, but I used it in my current builds and it turns out pretty much perfect for terminal use for me, just wide enough.
The hookiest tail for lowercase l man, love it.
Even for my own website, with some tighter tracking and it can work okay as a text font.
Re: Width -- Same, default is too narrow and extended is too wide for my taste. The custom build has a default "semi-extended" which is just right for me and has a width of 548. Again no clue why that number, but if Iosevka says that is right then it is :) I do see that when I switch between semi-extended and a "regular" font like Cascadia Code that they seem to be the exact same width.
The default spacing is too narrow for my liking but what's really cool is in the amount of customization that's possible, including lookalikes of some popular paid programming fonts (I'm partial to Iosvmata).
Iosevka is one of those fonts you can tell has had so much work put into it over the years. It is so customizable and works in a lot of contexts, although it’s a little narrow to code in for my taste. I’ve really liked Junicode (serif) for the same reason. Lots of customization options and care in the details.
First time I used Iosevka I felt really nauseated, kind of like getting motion sickness, it was a really bizarre experience for a font to give me. I was on a smaller screen though and getting some more characters in without getting tiny was actually a selling point, so I gave it another go and eventually got over the feeling.
Now (after ... gosh, 6, 7, 8? years probably) I love it, use it everywhere and other monospace font feels super w i d e and weird.
Have been using it for a couple years. Before that I was using Fira Code/Mono which was also fantastic. However, once I got used to the condensed Iosevka, all the other fonts just felt loose and not space efficient enough in my IDE and terminal.
I am the opposite. I have CommitMono, Iosevka, Source Code Pro installed, but I always come back to Fira Code/Mono. At the same overall density of text, I find that I can skim through the text faster when the font is wider.
It's interesting how personal font choice (among many other things) is!
I know it's a ridiculous thing to say, but the fact that I can customise the font so well on the website only to then not be able to download it like that is a crime. I don't want to muck about with npm just to build a font - do it on the site! /rant
My go-to monospace font in everything I use nowadays. Way back, it used to be JetBrains Mono. When I decided to give Iosevka a try, I actually started with the expanded variant, because I wasn't accustomed to the narrow jump. Took a while, but at some point I took that jump back to the default and it's stuck. Thanks for your efforts on this font Renzhi!
I have been using a union of Iosevka for most characters and Source Han Sans for CJK characters called Sarasa Gothic[0] for my roguelike (HexWalker)[1]. Iosevka's narrow characters are what originally inspired me to do it. Two Iosevka half-width glyphs literally form a square in the terminal, and if off-set by one characters, can be used to emulate a pointy-side up hexgrid in the terminal. In the end my love for the Iosevka letter shapes made me build HexWalker for the web, because it is easier to set custom fonts there than in the terminal.
If you want to use Iosevka on your webpage there is a variant on google fonts called Iosevka Charon[2] that is really easy to use.
Personally, I use filtered version of Iosevka that just contains the characters and variants I need for my personal website. For HexWalker I filter Sarasa Term to the characters I used, which takes it down to 42kb from 50mb+.
Emacs heads will know Prot. Mandatory shout out to his Iosevka customized version Aporetic [0], previously called 'Iosevka Comfy', which has become my daily driver.
I’ve used Iosevka for years but recently switched to Commit Mono [0]. It hits all the right spots for me, is customizable, and does smart kerning which is neat.
Hadn't seen this one yet, but that's exactly the type of sensibility I personally prefer in a monospace (Menlo has remained my daily driver for years).
A friend pointed me to a derivative of Iosevka that tries to mimic the historical (and commercially licensed) Pragmata Pro and the result is an insanely great font I've migrated to recently: https://github.com/shytikov/pragmasevka
The font looks pretty good, and its compactness seems promising. But with my low screen resolution and high-contrast color scheme, it starts to strain my eyes when reading large blocks of text.
It's a descriptive label of the general lineage the designer considers their font to be in, not an ISO spec.
A little bit of looseness here is a pretty strong signal for careful font design actually. It means the creator considered some other factor (in this case char disambiguation) to be more important than rigid adherence to the category.
The default font since GNOME 48 is Adwaita Sans (a modified Inter with different l's and I's) and for monospace it is Adwaita Mono (a modified Iosevka.)
I have been using this font for 3 years now. I can't, and won't get off it. I use it wherever I can - heck there's an Arch package! I'm pleasantly surprised by how much something this simple makes me happy. Legitimately a font has added to my life.
As we are using hypertext, I thought it would be useful to throw a link in here... but following your instructions feels like navigating a paper map. I don't see LICENSE.md here: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/releases
Once we use Berkeley mono font, we will never switch to another one :)
Whenever font discussions come up, I will try everyones suggestions to find better than what I have, and always came back to Berkeley. Its almost near perfect for coding!
It has very poor character coverage, especially compared to Iosevka whose author speaks Mandarin as his main language (IIRC), and put a lot of effort into supporting as many languages as possible.
I've been using Iosevka for more than 5 years now, it seems odd using anything else. The author is prolific and has made it really easy to build your own customised version. I don't think I'll ever move from using it.
It was such an interesting font that when I saw another font "Ioskeley Mono", I decided to customize it myself: https://github.com/ferronweb/iron-mono :)
For me, Iosevka will always be the one that worked. It got me to abandon bitmap fonts.
Iosevka, a proper fontconfig, and this value `export FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="cff:no-stem-darkening=0 autofitter:no-stem-darkening=0"` are all I ever needed.
I can't say precisely, but it fixed a lot of the blurring and bad rendering in general for me. I found it in a couple articles mentioning it, this is one: https://blog.aktsbot.in/no-more-blurry-fonts.html
It also has many weights. In my opinion it's one of the best monospaced fonts where you actually can use weight as an additional dimension in syntax highlighting.
I've been using Droid Sans Mono for everything mono for a long time and can recommend it. But this font might be great too. Any Droid Sans Mono lovers out there?
Fonts from Google have been bland and monotonous. The only nice font that Google released is Spectral(from France), but it is a proportional serif font.
The heading of Iosevka doesn't do the font right, my first thought was that this would be yet another soulless sans-serif. But it has tons of interesting variants. Hats of to Iosevka Etoile. See also <https://monaspace.githubnext.com> if you like big versatile font families.
> Wish code editors would support different fonts per semantic region
They absolutely do. In Emacs I use different faces for comments, tables in literate sections, and code blocks. I use the same font for all those faces, but different attributes (size, weight, etc).
I also have configured different fonts for different unicode code points, so that when I include Cyrillic or Japanese text I can use a font with better code point coverage that my preferred fonts.
It always astounds me how unconfigurable most editors are.
I fell in love with the narrow width of Iosevka which saved quite a bit of screen space for other things. Although there are always some people that loathe whenever I post screenshots of code using the font, "the m looks like a solid block of pixels" and the like.
Their examples of their font made me fall in love with an alternative, IBM Plex, that they showed. IBM Plex shows more of their example assembly code than any of the other three, and quite clearly.
I've been using Iosevka for years now, it's definitely one of my favorites. What I enjoy the most is that it's narrow, so I can cram more data per line.
I use both the standard/fixed versions and Aile and Etoile for UI.
Good to know that the age old tradition of calling a font with serifs sans-serif is well alive and kicking.
The reason here is that the basic glyph shape is that of a sans-serif, but still got serifs added afterwards. That doesn't stop it from diluting the meaning of the term.
Where does it say it is a sans-serif font? The very first full sentence on the page starts with "Iosevka is an open-source, sans-serif + slab-serif, monospace + quasi‑proportional typeface family", just like the title here says "sans-serif and slab-serif".
It’s nice to see this font have a slab serif, because monospace serif fonts are quite rare (I don’t consider Courier a serif). The only other monospace serif font I can think of is Monaspace Xenon. [1]
[1] There was also at one point a monospace variant of Bitstream Vera Serif called “Verily Serif”.
It is interesting that it differentiates between oblique and italic, something that not many fonts aimed at the monospace crowd do, in both the English and Cyrillic alphabets. The list of variants for the letter k is longer than I expected.
Alas, it is oblong, not square.
And 7 thousand-odd code points is not as large a range as it used to be a couple of decades ago. That said, it does have MouseText, the 7-segment LED digits, and suchlike from the Supplementary Plane 1.
I remember falling in love with PragmataPro many years ago, I really like narrow fonts, but I couldn’t afford it (I don’t remember how much it was at the time but it was something insane, at least for my wallet). Then Iosevka entered the scene, and I never looked back. Really awesome project, especially the customization part.
Fabrizio has dropped the price by 40% typically on Black Friday sales. I missed that window and bough full price though, no regrets, it's one of the first customizations to go on a new OS install for me.
This is the best font I have ever found, and I have tried a lot of them over the years. The ability to specify your own variations and generate your own fonts is really useful. I am a big fan of the dotted zero, for example.
The readability is excellent, and this font replaced everything else that I tried before. Highly recommended!
I don't think LLMs are ever going to take off in the coding space. Even the largest proponents of it have quit due to the exceptionally bad code quality.
The only place it works is dumb boilerplate generation (ie, a smarter replacement for templates), but the real fix for that is just jettisoning languages that beat you to death with boilerplate; its 2026, stop using C++ and Java.
I've extensively tried every LLM model, commercial or not, and for real languages like Rust or Zig, they perform poorly, and for footgun-laden languages like C++ or Java or Python, it just hands you the footgun and helps you aim the thing.
Used Iosevka for a while, now fully on Aporetic for everything monospace. Something about the thin and tall serif just clicks with me, and Aporetic seemed to work better size wise for my terminals and GUIs.
The part you'd all be interested is the table at the bottom: ideal font size to get the most out of your favorite code font, but also ordered by font size (for maximum code density on screen while still being readable).
Even though vector fonts are, well, vectors and not bitmaps, they often are fuzzy or misshapen at some sizes. The only way to objectively judge a font is to view it at it's best. Some fonts are objectively bad.
Iosevka is my daily driver, but not the most dense font on the list.
Is there a PDF specimen? I disable font substitution in my browser, but I do want to have a peek. But not a peek that requires reconfiguring my browser.
Kids, gather 'round, story time: my first computer when I was a kid was a communist hacky clone of a ZX Spectrum; and at one point I managed to install CP/M on it (I had no idea at the time what an OS was, I just intuit that it was a 'big deal'); and for whatever reason, this OS used a very tall and narrow font and I loved it sooo much that ever since then, I associate the tall narrow fonts with the halcyon time of excitement and exploration of those innocent days.
I put Iosevka everywhere, not only in text editors but browsers and other desktop apps. It's one of the first things to do on a fresh machine. Thank you very much, @be5invis!
Possibly something similar to GitHub Monaspace's "texture healing" [1], i.e. variable-width characters individually centered on a fixed grid, for which e.g. an "m" is wider when placed next to an "i"?
...or maybe something much less sophisticated: it just keeps the appearance of the main fixed-width variant you'd use for code, but it's a slightly-variable width variant for plain text, where vertical alignment isn't important.
It's a very good font for me because I care very much about density. Iosevka is by far the highest horizontal density I've ever used. However I have usually fallen back to Consolas, which IMHO the greatest monospace font ever made. The density is very high and it is very readable. There is no doubt that Iosevka is more attractive, but for some reason Consolas "feels" better at similar density.
But let's look at the font used here on HN. Sure, it's monospace, but it's not particularly thin. Mx ... the x-height is pretty close the em-width. So that quote should probably read "for our idea of typical serif fonts".
What does it mean for a font (or typeface) to be "quasi‑proportional"?
Also, whoever said that fonts intended for a terminal need to be narrower? Some terminals have narrower chars, some wider. And terminal emulators often allow for multiple char aspect ratios - e.g. via bitmap fonts of different aspect ratio.
Anyway, the typeface looks interesting, but I would have liked for the creators to compare and contrast it with existing (and popular) monospace / terminal-oriented typefaces.
I felt like my eyes hurt when I tried this font. It's hard for me to switch away from the standard width monospace fonts. At the moment I use Commit Mono. Extra horizontal space might be nice but it's not worth risking any discomfort
They're my two favourite! Iosevka edges it as Maple looks slightly fuzzier to me for some reason but they are both great. I have to use the narrow or slim version of it though
The SS08 version is influenced heavily by it, but Pragmata is quite horizontally squished I find. Iosevka had a bit more space vertically between the lines.
Half a gig for a single variant of this font? No, thank you. That just doesn't make any sense. Perform some minification and/or publish just TTF or OTF.
I've been using a custom version - you can customize the font¹ and build your own ttf (or better yet, ttc) using the build system supplied in the repository².
be5invis, the author of the font, deserves a special mention for creating a whole custom DSL called PatEL (Parametric Type Expression Language) to generate the font programmatically!
Renzhi, if you ever come around to read this, thank you so much for Iosevka, man!
¹https://typeof.net/Iosevka/customizer
²https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/blob/master/doc/custom-b...
I tried it again, quickly set it up in my terminal the "Iosevka Term" version, switching from Jetbrains Mono, and just don't understand how can people read this.
But, after using Berkeley Mono for three minutes, I switched to it everywhere in a week or so, and never looked back, or looked anywhere else, to be precise.
Yes, it's not free, and yes it's opinionated. I can say that my opinions align with that font pretty much. It's one of the things which I cherish like an expensive hand tool which really does its job very well and makes you happy with its presence.
[0]: https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono
I faintly remember about the though process of italics, but I don't remember it now. They don't look uncomfortable to me, anyway.
It's a modern yet period correct version of these older fonts, with proper character set support and love for details. It's so perfect for me, it becomes invisible, or as the Berkeley's page says: "It's boring. It's good"*.
Or as I mailed the creator after using it a couple of weeks: "It's so perfect that it transported all my computers to 70s, in a good way".
*: When I was writing this comment, I wondered whether I really set my browser's monospace font to Berkeley. It becomes that transparent after a while.
You can start with $75 package and work your way up if you feel like you need them.
[0] https://www.programmingfonts.org/#iosevka
[0] https://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono
https://github.com/be5invis/PatEL
It’s a real hackers typeface.
When I asked, somebody said it fits more characters in terminals and code editors. This sounds incredibly obvious, but for whatever reason that was eye-opening for me and helped me appreciate it a lot more when I tried it again. Now I can't use anything else.
I now switched to Ioskeley Mono, which is an Iosevka configuration made to look similar to Berkeley Mono:
https://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono
Either the Iosevka originals or Ioskeley are gorgeous fonts. I'm grateful to its creator.
Why is ttc better?
https://pastebin.com/WwYY0QqX
Copy and paste into Import Configuration at https://typeof.net/Iosevka/customizer to preview.
That could be the maximum I'd like out of font to have "proper" greater/less-equal sign.
This goes down to the details like that you should either use spaces over tabs OR prescribe editor config such that the code looks similar on each machine.
Of course this doesn't automatically mean that code ligatures are harmful, but I would be quite wary of using them. At the very least it introduces some friction, not sure if the arguably lower mental load of using real mathematical symbols instead of the ASCII symbols makes up for it.
I guess my IDE choices never surface the issue for me... visually they just look the same. I cannot say which codebase uses spaces which uses tabs. I never even think about it. I just smash tab character and don't care that there have been spaces. Or enter or { and IDE does the indentation. I just choose not to press space 2-4-8-16 times in a row.
Now I hope I won't get bulldozed over by HN crowd...
With tabs pretty much every editor except something like notepad.exe could do it since ancient times, with spaces the editor needs to do a bit more processing, so you were a bit more restricted in editor choice, if you really were bothered so much by the indents chosen in the project.
So it is actually quite similar to the ligature discussion. It would be good if the code looked the same for everybody but now instead of saying "But 8-space indents waste so much space on the screen :(" some people now go "But I don't like seeing things like != or -> instead of modern Unicode symbols :("
These days, I try avoid them outside of makefiles.
That said, the original UNIX V7 implementation of /bin/sh didn’t distinguish different kinds of whitespace:
https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/bourne/v7/
It's too bad spaces won, tabs is just correct I think, since one can configure the tabstop to use any indent size they would like. I'm quite tired of reading 2-space indent. Seems everything has moved this way now except python. I'm even seeing C with it, which is especially jarring. I think the languages that use braces for indentation particularly need 4. Python needs it least, and I can read Ruby because its blocks are delimited by words and it's bad style to write long methods
Granted, I'm also someone who heavily encourages the use of Black as the Python formatter in projects I'm on, specifically because it has no configurable options - can't have a holy war about formats if nothing can be changed.
The reason spaces won is that it's not (spaces) vs (tabs), it's (spaces) vs (tabs AND spaces).
Personally, I like them. They look pleasing and I never had issues distinguishing between the ligatures for ==, ===, and = itself.
https://github.com/samboy/CaulixtlaFonts/tree/main/MiscFonts...
For example, ligatures in Fira Code cannot be disabled when using the Cygwin terminal in Windows (mintty). In that application, for example, “===” looks like three continuous long lines atop each other in Fira Code, with no way to make it look like three equal signs again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fira_(typeface)
From https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode
“Fira Code is not only about ligatures. Some fine-tuning is done for punctuation and frequent letter pairs.” Note that without ligature support, a lot of that fine tuning is lost.
Now, seriously, a programming font has no (and should never have) awareness of the computer language it's representing. Ligatures make sense if they present meaning in a way easier to read than the non-combined characters. I can't type := in APL and expect the REPL to think it's an attribution arrow (←).
I get APL is a rather extreme language to talk about, but this is one example where ligatures would harm the programmer (unless your editor replaces a ":=" with a "←"). Source code is a very precise language and the choice of characters you use matters a lot. A "<-" doesn't mean "←" unless the language declares so.
But also... I know I have the minority opinion on this. It absolutely should be opt-in, not opt-out. I think the past decade, I've been told the font tweaks I enable are incomprehensable to everyone I work with. The way I like my IDE fonts is far outside the bell curve (ligatures, cursive variants for some syntax, proportional variants for prose) so the fact that most new monospace code-focused fonts seem to align with my opinions should be concerning to font makers! I like that I don't have to patch a different font's italics into my code font anymore, but common sense says I SHOULD still have to do that!
[0] https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono#ligatures
I'm not sure however that the verb form makes all that much sense in the context the website uses it...
Ligation is (among other things) the act of applying a ligature. So it does make sense.
It is aggressive in its unicode support. You want to use vulgar fractions? Or Mayan numerals? They'll work. You want to use mathematical notation like ∈? It works.
You can literally do this:
`my $var = ⅒ + 2 + Ⅻ;`
https://docs.raku.org/language/unicode_ascii
I can't include an example here because VC News strips out math.
∂ₓₙ = [(₁ ⊗ ʹ) (₂ ⊗ ʹ) ( ⊗ ₁) ( ⊗ ₂)]
And last I checked, BPL is in the same boat.
(...I also find them annoying to look at, idk why)
Anyway, since you want a direct representation of the text - presumably, you configured your editor to render EOL sequences explicitly, to distinguish tabs from spaces, etc?
I don't like them because I never know what they actually stand for in ASCII.
I'm guessing the website author added that after some "website performance tool" recommended it, as they make sweeping generalizations that don't always make sense in every context, and "always add font-display: swap so text is readable earlier" is now a dogmatic rule "web developers" (mechanical or wetware ones) add without thinking, so that precious performance number goes up.
Also, I think also led by Google, `font-display: block;` actually behaves the same as swap now, just with a longer wait for the font to load [1]. Iosevka’s webpage does use swap, though.
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...
The hookiest tail for lowercase l man, love it.
Even for my own website, with some tighter tracking and it can work okay as a text font.
Another great customizable font is Maple Mono [0]
[0] https://font.subf.dev/en/
(I am excited to try this out)
https://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono
https://github.com/shytikov/pragmasevka
https://github.com/N-R-K/Iosvmata
Now (after ... gosh, 6, 7, 8? years probably) I love it, use it everywhere and other monospace font feels super w i d e and weird.
It's interesting how personal font choice (among many other things) is!
Chat history (excuse the lazily-constructed prompt): https://chatgpt.com/share/6acf829b-5428-83ec-939c-acbc7805a3...
This is exactly what he's talking about. It's not one-click
Iosevka typeface for code, from code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36785409 - July 2023 (76 comments)
Iosevka – Versatile typeface for code, from code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30014796 - Jan 2022 (36 comments)
Iosevka, Version 3.0.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23230929 - May 2020 (40 comments)
Iosevka – A Typeface for Code, from Code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14009963 - April 2017 (122 comments)
Show HN: Iosevka Open Source Programming Typeface - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9951989 - July 2015 (27 comments)
(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)
If you want to use Iosevka on your webpage there is a variant on google fonts called Iosevka Charon[2] that is really easy to use.
Personally, I use filtered version of Iosevka that just contains the characters and variants I need for my personal website. For HexWalker I filter Sarasa Term to the characters I used, which takes it down to 42kb from 50mb+.
[0] https://github.com/be5invis/sarasa-gothic
[1] https://ytirnity.com/games/hexwalker
[2] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Iosevka+Charon
[0] https://github.com/protesilaos/aporetic
[0] https://commitmono.com/
Why are there so many new awesome projects like this?
I'm not complaining, just trying to understand what drives the creation of open source fonts.
I tried various fonts and settled on Martian Mono VF (https://github.com/evilmartians/mono). At a width of 0.6, it’s quite comfortable to read.
https://apl385.com/fonts/
…IBM Plex and Iosevka were in the running, but the subtle “Comic Sans” effect of the APL font make the code easier to scan, subjectively speaking.
Maybe it's because I'm just too used to DejaVu Sans Mono Book, but I couldn't use this as a daily driver at all.
Luckily we can all have our terminals the way we want :)
I uninstalled it specifically because it was slowing down my updates and builds
A little bit of looseness here is a pretty strong signal for careful font design actually. It means the creator considered some other factor (in this case char disambiguation) to be more important than rigid adherence to the category.
I like it a lot!
Both Inter and Iosevka are gorgeous fonts.
Cantarell was so, so ugly.
But alright, I realized you must download the archive to find LICENSE.md in there: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/archive/refs/tags/v34.9....
The license is "SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1." from http://scripts.sil.org/OFL
Whenever font discussions come up, I will try everyones suggestions to find better than what I have, and always came back to Berkeley. Its almost near perfect for coding!
https://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono
>Iosevka configuration to mimic the look and feel of Berkeley Mono as closely as possible.
Discussed recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49161743
Shame.
The most underrated font ever.
Iosevka, a proper fontconfig, and this value `export FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="cff:no-stem-darkening=0 autofitter:no-stem-darkening=0"` are all I ever needed.
My personal daily drivers are SF Mono and Berkeley Mono.
https://github.com/be5invis/sarasa-gothic
Fonts from Google have been bland and monotonous. The only nice font that Google released is Spectral(from France), but it is a proportional serif font.
The heading of Iosevka doesn't do the font right, my first thought was that this would be yet another soulless sans-serif. But it has tons of interesting variants. Hats of to Iosevka Etoile. See also <https://monaspace.githubnext.com> if you like big versatile font families.
They absolutely do. In Emacs I use different faces for comments, tables in literate sections, and code blocks. I use the same font for all those faces, but different attributes (size, weight, etc).
I also have configured different fonts for different unicode code points, so that when I include Cyrillic or Japanese text I can use a font with better code point coverage that my preferred fonts.
It always astounds me how unconfigurable most editors are.
I use both the standard/fixed versions and Aile and Etoile for UI.
The reason here is that the basic glyph shape is that of a sans-serif, but still got serifs added afterwards. That doesn't stop it from diluting the meaning of the term.
for this, i like Input Sans a lot.
https://input.djr.com/
[1] There was also at one point a monospace variant of Bitstream Vera Serif called “Verily Serif”.
Alas, it is oblong, not square.
And 7 thousand-odd code points is not as large a range as it used to be a couple of decades ago. That said, it does have MouseText, the 7-segment LED digits, and suchlike from the Supplementary Plane 1.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9951989
The readability is excellent, and this font replaced everything else that I tried before. Highly recommended!
One thing I definitely love is it's easy to access. It has been packed for many package managers. I can just brew install or yay -S to get it.
The only place it works is dumb boilerplate generation (ie, a smarter replacement for templates), but the real fix for that is just jettisoning languages that beat you to death with boilerplate; its 2026, stop using C++ and Java.
I've extensively tried every LLM model, commercial or not, and for real languages like Rust or Zig, they perform poorly, and for footgun-laden languages like C++ or Java or Python, it just hands you the footgun and helps you aim the thing.
Are you living under a rock? o_o
I am very much paying attention to the current state of LLM acceptance.
[1] https://github.com/ash/rakupp/
The part you'd all be interested is the table at the bottom: ideal font size to get the most out of your favorite code font, but also ordered by font size (for maximum code density on screen while still being readable).
Even though vector fonts are, well, vectors and not bitmaps, they often are fuzzy or misshapen at some sizes. The only way to objectively judge a font is to view it at it's best. Some fonts are objectively bad.
Iosevka is my daily driver, but not the most dense font on the list.
https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka
Some time ago I switched to wayland/sway/foot, and I'm on 0xProtoNerdFont, quite pleasant as well.
Lovely font.
I put Iosevka everywhere, not only in text editors but browsers and other desktop apps. It's one of the first things to do on a fresh machine. Thank you very much, @be5invis!
...or maybe something much less sophisticated: it just keeps the appearance of the main fixed-width variant you'd use for code, but it's a slightly-variable width variant for plain text, where vertical alignment isn't important.
[1] https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace#texture-healing
The M is 1/2 of an M wide?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Em_(typography)
it seems the width of an M should be exactly equal to the x-height in points (IIUC).
But let's look at the font used here on HN. Sure, it's monospace, but it's not particularly thin. Mx ... the x-height is pretty close the em-width. So that quote should probably read "for our idea of typical serif fonts".
Also, whoever said that fonts intended for a terminal need to be narrower? Some terminals have narrower chars, some wider. And terminal emulators often allow for multiple char aspect ratios - e.g. via bitmap fonts of different aspect ratio.
Anyway, the typeface looks interesting, but I would have liked for the creators to compare and contrast it with existing (and popular) monospace / terminal-oriented typefaces.
https://tosche.net/fonts/comic-code
Support independent devs and designers. Pay the money.
These days I'm using Maple Mono though.