JetBrains Mono – the free and open-source typeface for developers

Playing that game though ended up with liking Roboto Mono the most, Fira being a close second.

Whenever I try the winning font (b612, fira mono), I always go back to Liberation Mono.

I have been using Fira Code extensively and also writing texts. Both in English & in Greek, both spotting my mistakes and reading what I'd written improved within minutes of first trying it out. I may give JetBrains Mono a try as well, though I really am taken with Fira Code.

Unfortunately I have yet to find the perfect general purpose font to use in general. Ubuntu fonts do come really close to being perfect.

1) Looking at the font names I eventually picked my favorite/workhorse: IBM Plex.

2) With hidden names, I picked Courier Prime, which I disliked at first sight.

3) Again with hidden name, I picked Cousine, which looked alright in the simulator but had lines that were too strong and even on my more contrasted color scheme. I prefer fonts with varying line widths, which the game didn't really detect -- it was mostly unreadable versus readable.

[0] http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/

But Deja Vu Mono is notably absent and I still prefer that.

I ended up going with a slashed zero variant of JetBrains Mono. Now it's perfect.

My history is: Monoid -> Iosevka SS05 -> Essential PragmataPro

I just compared the latter two to JetBrains Mono, and at least on my settings, doing a blink comparison, they both look more clear to me.

It is my all-time favorite font.

SF Mono works great in any system (not just Fruit) but you'll need to use a few tools to dig down to get the OTF's out of the DMG.

[0] https://www.ibm.com/plex/

(someone should do a hn poll on programming fonts.)

I like the old italics better.

[0]: https://github.com/madmalik/mononoki/issues/29#issuecomment-...

- Me

I honestly really didn't like them at first, but I came to love Fira Code after a couple false starts.

My IDE catches the errors this guy mentions.

I also think it would be interesting if a programming language used the Unicode characters that ligatures simulate rather than combinations of general purpose characters, but that seems unlikely given that it’d require a new programmer-oriented keyboard layout.

The worst offenders tend to be anything involving '!' and '=' and the many varying stylistic interpretations of it. It appears that font designers are in a race to outdo each other, or introduce it for the 'coolness' factor and eschewing the practicalities involved.

But I don't want to be a grump and I do keep trying out ligature fonts every now and again, always with negative results.

While this is true, it doesn't seem to come up that often in practice. I'd say this appears when I'm viewing log files or something that isn't a programming language.

Also, if something doesn't turn red when you swap an = for a == then it's time to re-evaluate code coverage.

Edit: I should note that I mainly write C and C++. Other languages may make ligatures less pleasant

Bottom line is it's just there, enable or disable depending on your preference.

Let's say "→" misrepresents the meaning of "->" even as much as 0.1% of the time. Would you rather your risk of error be 99.9%, or 0.1%?

I'm sick of anti-ligature people telling everyone else not to enjoy their fonts, on every single post about a font. Ligatures have caught on for a reason.

I've used ligatures now for several years (with JetBrains Mono in particular for some time). I've done lots of pair programming and a common immediate reaction is "How can I get those too?! It makes it so nice to read and understand".

Instead of throwing them out because of some edge cases, why not improve the software for the edge cases?

But I still use them ;).

That leads into my personal issue with ligatures: they change what should be a binary operation into a more complex one. Instead of "I see equals signs, one space or two?" it becomes "I need to stop, change to a vertical reading direction, and see if that's 2 or 3 lines" or "I need to estimate if that is 2 or 3 characters worth of width, or get off track comparing it to characters on the line above." Comparison operators should simply be "greater space equals" but become "wait, was there a second line there? I have to go back and double check that."

I'm sure someone will come along and say "how is reading the number of spaces different than reading the number of lines?" It might be that the spacing is normalized without ligatures, it might just be the vertical spacing in ligatures is too small, I don't really know. It's incredibly difficult to convey this to someone who doesn't experience it, all I can say is it is a night and day difference to me.

I've given Fira Code a shot 2 or 3 times but have found the ligatures to hinder my productivity every time. I also tried them just in the "reader mode" with Jetbrains Mono when that feature was first released, but had to turn it off after a few days.

That all being said, I won't fault anyone for using them if it helps them in the same way that not using them helps me. I'm just glad they can be disabled in Jetbrains Mono as it is otherwise an incredible font.

I'm sure it's a highly personal thing, but Matthew Butterick proclaims it's more universally bad than it actually is.

That is why there's a checkbox for enabling ligatures.

Like why is this a thing? It's like proclaiming certain font sizes aren't worth it. My dev machine is my interface. I should be able to do what I like with it.

Edit: I guess he addresses this in a footnote, but hardly:

> “What do you mean, it’s not a matter of taste? I like using ligatures when I code.” Great! In so many ways, I don’t care what you do in private. Although I predict you will eventually burn yourself on this hot mess, my main concern is typography that faces other human beings.

A) I've never burned myself b) other than screen shares (again, nary a complaint, but several "cool! How do I get that?") I'm never rendering code for others to consume. I agree that a ligatured font would be bad e.g. for publishing code in a whitepaper.

Surely the readers are reading the code in the font of their choosing. If they get miscued by ligatures, that's squarely on them, because they're the ones that chose to read it in a ligature font. That's the beauty of fonts - they can be very personal.

So languages that want to express more with different symbols find it difficult to do so with our limited set. You end up with combinations of symbols that look familiar to existing combination of symbols, and for those who find this problematic to read we have ligatures.

I also hate dark mode and small fonts, and I let my code run way past 120 chars per line when it's right to do so.

I couldn't possibly care how other developers read code. I want them to be able to read my code and so I try to code for clarity, but I can't imagine a font choice or many other IDE preferences affecting their ability to read the code I write.

I was using this font in Rider when JetBrains made it the default, but gave up after several months. The ligatures were giving me a pause still. The effect was opposite to ease of reading the code.

Hilarious enough, many of the people who claim ligatures are objectively harmful are also those using archaic tools like vim/emacs. The number of errors that could've been prevented by highly sophisticated IDEs instead of toy text editors from the 80s is surely orders of magnitude higher than the purely theoretical ligature confusion.

Been using JetBrains Mono for months now, and I quite like it. But I found out the the font a YouTuber I watch uses is Iosevka, which I've been hearing about, so I'm going to go custom compile it with JetBrains Mono styling added in

And then I'll have to give this a go. Thanks.

People may not know that Inconsolata is now a 2-axis variable font with a particularly wide width range: 0.5 to 2.0 of the nominal width.

Interestingly enough, JetBrains Mono seems very similar to Menlo. Biggest difference I see is the 0.

My current favorite is Trebuchet MS, or more specifically a version of it that I tweaked in FontForge and call Trebuchet++.

Trebuchet MS ticks a lot of the boxes for me "as is". It doesn't have ligatures, but does have easily distinguished 0/O, I/l, etc. And it renders beautifully on the high-DPI monitors I use with the largish font sizes I prefer. I do most of my coding on a 24" 4K monitor, so it's just shy of 200 DPI, and I run it with 200% scaling on Windows and Linux.

One thing I don't like in Trebuchet MS is the tilde. It is a scrawny little thing that is hard to distinguish from a hyphen. So I used FontForge to swap in a much better tilde.

Then I had some fun with underscores.

I don't like snake_case_names at all, but some coding standards mandate them. One problem with proportional fonts is that the underscore is much wider than the period, so you get this effect:

snake_case.snake_case.snake_case

If you look at the spacing between words here, "case.snake" is more tightly grouped than "snake_case" - the opposite of how it should be.

I fixed this by adding a bit of space on each side of the period, and narrowing the space occupied by the underscore.

At first I tried just making the underline itself shorter, but it was hard to tell from a period. So instead I kept most of the underline width and narrowed the character box instead. The underline tucks under the adjacent characters a bit, but it looks OK.

The net effect is subtle, but for my eyes it makes snake_case.snake_case a little easier to read and understand.

I have been meaning to find out if and how I could open source Trebuchet++ (since it's based on a Microsoft font), but in the meantime drop me a note if you would like a copy to try out - email is in my profile.