But I kept coming back. Again and again, just looking through their page. I tried the trial. I eventually caved. A weird moment for me, but I bloody love this font and I frequently notice how nice it is in all my IDEs.
I sound like a shill, sorry.
Windows, 1920 x 1200 @ 96 dpi, Visual Studio, light-on-dark theme. I like 'em small to fit more on the screen and at 8px this font looks janky. It is blurry with uneven thickness and requires an eye strain to read. It doesn't seem to be hinted at all even though it is a TTF version.
Here's Berkley Mono on the left and Mensch on the right - https://i.imgur.com/CM27hVV.png
At 9px characters somehow retain their width but just get taller.
At 10px it starts looking better, but glyphs still look kinda feeble and aren't terribly pleasant to look at.
Just 2c. The character design is very nice still.
I’ll have to try it. I’m still using Lucida Console because most newer fonts lack hinting for smaller sizes.
I really like the look of the font, but the hinting needs to be fixed before I'd purchase it. It's currently unusable for me.
I'm used to use DejaVu Sans Mono. Under X (Linux) it works beautifully and stays relatively readable down to 7pt; I usually set it to 11pt.
Under Windows 10, on the same screen with same DPI, I could not make it look reasonably in native programs like Notepad++; it stays blurry up until ridiculously large sizes. Emacs, which of course brings its own rendering to Windows, is able to render it somehow more crisply.
Conversely, Consolas looks wonderful under Windows, crisp and sharp. I could not make it render equally well under Linux.
And macOS is another land; it refuses to make fonts crisp if matching the pixel grid would change their shape even slightly. The only recourse is retina displays.
YMMV.
Liberation Mono: from the very same package of fonts that are included in LibreOffice, I find it to be surprisingly readable and easy on the eyes for most kinds of code or monospaced text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts
PT Mono: while initially I really liked PT Sans and PT Serif separately (they're currently the fonts for my homepage/blog), their monospaced offering is also quite nice; albeit when there's some light colored text (e.g. comments) at the smaller font sizes, the full stop character can become a bit harder to see. Here's more information about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PT_Fonts
Here's a quick comparison, comparing the two fonts against Consolas and JetBrains Mono (with some Java code, taken from a throwaway project): https://imgur.com/a/mr9afqT
Personally, out of all of them Liberation Mono feels like the most readable, whereas PT Mono just appeals to me stylistically on some level. However, paid fonts, like the linked one are also great - whatever feels more pleasant to stare at for a large number of hours per day!
The Liberation font don't look bad but their wideness as well as that of other common FOSS fonts like the Vera/Bitstream fonts has always bugged me for some reason. Whenever I do a fresh Linux install and the desktop is configured to use one of those I have to download and install Inter UI or Ubuntu Sans as the UI font for it to not bug me.
[0]: https://philpl.gumroad.com/l/dank-mono [1]: https://rsms.me/inter/ [2]: https://design.ubuntu.com/font
I do however enjoy setting comments using fonts that aren't monospaced (which I begrudgingly acknowledge Comic Sans is actually decent for).
At some point though the old typographers adage of "people read best, what they read most" must impact our preferences.
This is not a this font vs. that font comment - it's about spending money on a font and how a lot of people find that a weird thing. For me, I came to the realization that it's a thing I literally spend hours every day looking at, so if spending a small amount of cash would improve that experience then why would I not do it?
And this isn't even the first monospaced font I've spent money on that I know I will probably not always use. I own Operator. Dank. Mono Lisa.
But the design and the attention to detail with downloading as regards to the stylistic set defaults (for applications that don't follow/adhere/support stylistic sets, which is something I could write a whole rant on) makes me very happy to support this team.
However, the difficulty of distinguishing italics from regular on a presentation I can mostly forgive it since I can now recognize the italics and that hint to whatever it is trying to show much more easily than if I was trying to figure out a color (I'm not color blind but that is an accessibility issue) or the 'is that tilted enough?'
(and looking for a bit of nostalgia, https://dank.sh/ now redirects to https://philpl.gumroad.com/l/dank-mono and while its done, it can be purchased again!)
Nobody cares. If you don't like them, then don't use them. They are optional.
Lots of people like them. Let people like things.
Authors of content and programs with ligatures-by-default subject their readers and users to the penalty of ligatures.
Some people like pain, but that doesn't mean we need pain switches on everything with pain set to on by default.
That's you, and not very generalizable. Many people edit on sites with ligatures and many people edit non-Latin text where isolated, non-ligatured text is wrong (Arabic, some Indic scripts, Han characters, Japanese katakana).
Me personally, with respect to code, I pretty much think in terms of tokens: to remove the `==`, I backspace twice, rather than that to remove the `==`, I remove `=` and then the other `=`, and each requires one backspace.
It's obviously personal preference, because many people prefer it. If I found ligatures harder to read or edit then I wouldn't use them, but I don't, so I do.
> programs with ligatures-by-default
Such as?
Obviously, many of the things my parents used were from the 1960’s or 1970’s, so that is what serious stuff for grown-ups looked like. (This condition could be hereditary. I have no children, but if I had, they would be exposed to things like my DSLR and stereo amp, both older than they would have been.)
I think this is what makes me like the aesthetics of this typeface so much. It is not what computers used to look like, what they look like today, or what they will look like tomorrow. It is what they were supposed to look like!
I really like a broken vertical bar. There's been a fight, where it became a solid vertical bar, then a broken vertical bar again, then a solid bar again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_bar
See the "Solid vertical bar vs broken bar" section.
Because mathematical "OR" and all that IIUC. But I don't care. I'm in control. So my monospace font use a broken vertical bar (and a taller one than what's usually seen too, there's no risk of mistaking my "broken bar" '|' with '!'). When I write "my" font, it's literally a font I made myself by using FontForge slightly modifying another font (I basically modified @$%&|l and a few other tiny details). I cannot distribute it though.
EDIT: funnily enough reading that Wikipedia article I posted, I checked my keyboards... Two of them, an old IBM Model M and a "not so old but still old" Sun keyboard do both have a broken bar printed as the vertical bar: I never realized that!
In another note, I really enjoy the simplicity in the website design.
In short, we think 1 keypress = 1 symbol printed on the screen. That explicitness brings peace. But, we also think that ligatures are optional and many people like them (read about all the pros and cons in the link above).
That makes everyone happy.
I love them and can barely tolerate not having them. These ligatures of yours filled my heart with joy. Thank you!
Berkeley Mono v1.008 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33614114 - Nov 2022 (2 comments)
Show HN: Berkeley Mono Typeface - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30557557 - March 2022 (171 comments)
The styling on this site is so neat
Hate to poop on others hard work, but i think Fira Code looks much better. The missing one i found might be critical for Clojurists, could be patched in FC.
This is what Berkeley Graphics says about it in the article that is linked:
>Nerd Fonts: We don't mind our customers patching the typeface. We respect your ownership of the typeface. However, Nerd Fonts are put together [haphazardly](https://www.nerdfonts.com/#home_) from several difference sources, kind of destroys our typeface's cohesiveness: We do not endorse it, we don't provide support to do this. It is a bad idea despite of its questionable usefulness. They're popular though and if you don't mind breaking the aesthetic uniformity of our typefaces, please go for it.
What does this font offer in support for unicode glyphs?
Please note that the trial version has the following limitations:
* Limited to ASCII-128 character set
* Missing '7' and 'S' glyphs
* Swapped: '/' and '\', '\*' and '#'Personally, I think this is fine. They are pretty explicit this is try before you buy checking it works. Not "use it free for 30 days and then we nag you" fully operational.