Comic Mono – a legible monospace font | Hacker News Reader

Comic Mono – a legible monospace font

github.com

131 pointsdTal51 comments

Surprised to see Fantasque Sans Mono[1] not mentioned yet. It's the best "comic"-style font I was aware of, which I used for coding/terminal for a long time (I currently use Victor Mono[2]).

[1] https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans/

[2] https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/

My preferred editor font. No code should ever be taken so seriously that you wouldn't render it in Comic Mono.

This. So much this :)

This font tries to increase cognitive ease by keeping the characters at the same width, but I don't think other popular monospace fonts aren't legible. I use Ubuntu Mono and have had no problems. I never understood why people use cursive fonts for code, which truly is illegible at times.

Comic Sans has a reputation for being more accessible for dyslexic people, presumably because the glyphs are more easily distinguishable. (Though I wonder if making it monospace negates that advantage somewhat)

It has this reputation but I haven't found scientific evidence.

There are specialized fonts for dyslexics, supported by research:

https://opendyslexic.org/

https://opendyslexic.org/related-research-1

That doesn't mean much. Other fonts designed for dyslexia have failed:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7188700/#!po=34...

I am not going to check every study here, which are helpfully not hyperlinked, but every one I checked showed no effect at all. Kind of disingenuous I think.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5629233/

I only checked the first one, which says:

"Results demonstrate that the group of pupils with dyslexia read significantly more accurately, with fewer errors, when using OpenDyslexic font."

It increases cognitive ease compared to what it intends to replace, which are other Comic Sans monospace fonts. I don't think it is claiming to be a cognitive improvement above all monospace fonts, unless they are saying that being comic-style is itself such an improvement.

I use Comic Code[1], which i learned about on HN. My only complaint is that w and W are too similar, otherwise I’ve found it great.

1: https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/tabular-type-foundry/comic-cod...

I prefer Comic Code too. It's missing a few ligatures and it has a rendering bug on the T on windows with some sizes, but it's still my default font in vscode.

Why is the one only example of the font available in the README in an agressive diagonal?

Just let me read the damn thing! This seems a bit ridiculous to me.

Yeah, I did find that gimmicky too. But if you click on that screenshot, it leads to a webpage typed completely in that font, so you can properly admire that.

Anyway, I'm genuinely surprised some people here don't treat that as a joke and are really using it for code editing, but whatever, anything is legit if you can read it. So I wouldn't complain about the diagonal screenshot either.

The lower case ‘L’ and ‘1’ are too similar. Pass.

I am guessing, but with the slightly tilted bars (like on the ‘e’), it probably looks pretty bad at low pixel densities.

I think Ubuntu Mono does a great job with unmistakable characters:

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Ubuntu+Mono?preview.text=!...

The lowercase 'l' as done in Ubuntu Mono (but it's not the only font doing that) is IMHO the best way to do lowercase 'l'. I'm not using Ubuntu Mono: I use a font I modified myself (sort of a mix between "Terminus" and "Monaco") and I do the lowercase 'l' as in Ubuntu Mono. I don't know which font did this type of lowercase 'l' first.

I'm not surprised that a font doing a good job having unmistakable character picked that for 'l'.

EDIT: funnily enough reading my post all the lowercase 'L' do look like an uppercase 'I'. Yup. Precisely what we want to avoid ; ) (that or looking like a '1' or like a pipe character).

Funny, because the lowercase "L" was the first thing that came to mind about Ubuntu Mono for me :)

I fully agree, but man, that upper-case G just looks naked. Even a small hook to the right would be a big help.

Andalé mono had it in 1993. I have a feeling Monaco might have had it before but I have no proof.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andal%C3%A9_Mono

Julia Mono use a similar glyph. I quite fancy Julia Mono: https://juliamono.netlify.app/

Does it has ä, ö, ü (for german)?

Yes. ß,å,ø,æ,ŋ,€ too.

Correction: Those are remains of some other font which the author modified to make the Comicmono. So "ä" and "a" look different and the size is not exactly right.

I will probably fix this issue and the "l"-issue too. And add it my to my collection of Stolen Fonts: https://github.com/timonoko/fonts

"the very typeface you’ve been trained to recognize since childhood"

Comic sans debuted in 1994, so, uh...no.

Edit: Yes, I'm aware some people were children in this general time period :)

That’s 27 years ago, I’d say that quite a few people have lived their childhoods with Comic Sans as a common font.

Yeah, I'm from '94 - I've never seen a world without Comic Sans. Or Wingdings for that matter.

That just triggered an old memory from very early me playing around with clip-art and transitions on PowerPoint.

The world before Comic Sans looked a lot like this to most people: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...

(IBM VGA 9x16 font, used by MSDOS and pretty much every PC from the mid 80s to 90s)

Actually, I thought that Hercules monochrome was a novel improvement on CGA.

I never saw the IBM monochrome that shipped with the original PC. I certainly saw a lot of CGA.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Graphics_Card

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter

I use this font in many places, and it gives people 2-3 years my junior nervous twitches. They associate it with events like "thing has gone wrong, time to reinstall windows".

I remember back in the early 2000s, having a QBASIC window open was enough to make most people say "you broke it". A blue screen covered in IBM VGA was firmly established as a bad sign by that point.

And before that: http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-44934.html

My childhood:

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~sedwards/apple2fpga/FPGA-FDEDL.j...

I know this is true, but I know it hurts me in my heart!

Before I was born.

Welp, now I feel old because I remember in 94 when it was the cool new font. I worked for an Early Childhood Education grant and we started using it on our forms to parents. Amazingly, it got a better response than the Courier New that was used on the official forms.

It's a reference to comic sans looking like hand drawn lettering in comic books, like the Amazing Spiderman etc?

Yup, that's what it was intended to look like and where the name comes from.

The typeface was familiar to me as a child even before Comic Sans came out as it is based on a lot of the writing in comic strips.

Most books are still printed with serif typefaces because they are easier to read. Is that becoming less true for younger people? A genuine question.

I have been using this for a while now. I love it. Thanks for making it!

So this is just Comic Shanns (https://github.com/shannpersand/comic-shanns) with a couple of tweaks and a name change?

Yes? It's literally the first line of the repo description.

> A legible monospace font... the very typeface you’ve been trained to recognize since childhood. This font is a fork of Shannon Miwa’s Comic Shanns (version 1).

Comic Shanns is already a legible monospace font. What value is added here?

monofur ftw

How is this different than Consolas (currently default font in Visual Studio)?

For one, it's a completely different font. It being monospace is pretty much the only similarity.

No thanks. I’m so tired of yet another programmers font.

Why? Not looking at something, not trying out something or just nothing to do with something is the easiest thing in the world! Just ignore it!

I thought it was an essential trait of programmers to never be satisfied with something.

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