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Comment by noir_lord | Hacker News Reader

Iosevka for me, you can custom build it with the letter designs you want, it supports ligatures and it's condensed without been cramped (also has Term, non-term and Slab variants in the same build).

It's replaced my mono font everywhere, Fira Code is lovely but it feels way too wide once you've used Iosevka.

The only font that comes close is Pragmata Pro but that's not free.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/be5invis/Iosevka/master/im...

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I paid for the original Pragmata font in 2004, and he has kept sending updates surprisingly often ever since. I suppose I upgraded to Pragmata Pro in 2011, so only 8 years of updates on that. Money well spent for 40 hours a week of use

https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/

That looks interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Commenting to find this later on.

I wasn't knocking Pragmata Pro and the dude has the right to charge for his work.

That said for my needs Iosevka and Pragmata are pretty much a dead heat and one is free and open.

If you prefer Pragmata then sure the the cost per hour over a decade is irrelevant (the same reason I pay out of pocket for intellij ultimate at work, work would pay for it but I use it outside of work and it's not worth the hassle).

I will chime in as another huge Iosevka fan.

I have never really liked any of the other popular coding fonts and it really comes down to one thing: They are all stupid sans-serif fonts.

I have found, ever since displays grew out of the garbage 100 dpi age, that serif fonts are vastly more enjoyable to look at and easier to quickly visually discern.

As a result, Iosevka Slab is basically the only code-optimized font I can even consider.

Beyond that, I prefer a narrower font for monospace text. Monospace is already such an awful layout for readability, but, making it narrower at least helps reduce the horizontal scan range without imposing insane limits like 72 character lines.

So, those are my reasons anyway.

My reasons are identical to yours, I also use the Slab version since my 'worst' screens are 2560x1440@24" it's just lovely on Linux.

> Monospace is already such an awful layout for readability...

So why code in a monospaced font then? There's no rule that says you have to write code in a monospaced font. I've used proportional fonts for many years, and almost every programmer's editor supports them.

I'm currently using a slightly modified version of Trebuchet MS (I replaced the tilde with a better one). Another example is Input Sans, one of the three fonts today's thread is about.

If you like proportional fonts, go for it!

Reasons: I haven't found a proportional code font I like very much and, more importantly, many—MANY—existing code files include text arranged with the expectation of monospace fonts and if you use proportional, they become a mess.

Agreed.

All respect to those who like proportional fonts, to each their own, but I think of code as a 2d grid.

Same reason I use syntax highlighting: color is another dimension that helps me see what I’m doing. This is particularly notable in Lisps, where turning on rainbow parens can be like switching on a light switch, immediately helping me understand the shape of the forms.

Inconsolata

> but it feels way too wide

It seems the weirdest thing to me that fonts – especially monospaced fonts – vary by width.

I'm working on a forum redesign at the moment. Picking a font took a surprising while, because the font the forum had used – Source Sans Pro – is naturally narrow. Put something wider in, and it's entirely not the same.

I have, similarly, replaced monospaced fonts everywhere with Fira Code. Characteristically, Iosevka looks too narrow to me. :)

I think Mononoki has reasonably similar proportions to Source Sans (matches better than Source Code), and is pretty and highly legible. Only issue is "bold is taller than normal" and vertically misaligned parentheses.

I'm fond of Iosevka as well - but the downside to the narrow font is that it uses very slightly more vertical space than say Bitstream Vera Sans which is my other "go to" font.

Great font though. Recommended.

I use Iosevka (in Notepad++) and M+ (in Emacs), both very nice at rather small sizes.

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