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Comment by wcerfgba | Hacker News Reader

Are there any monospaced fonts like this, with a focus on hyperlegibility?

I'm going to assume you want to use it for development. For screen fonts, you typically have different design goals, because otherwise anti-aliasing and ClearText will reduce contrast and void your legibility improvements by spreading things out over subpixels.

I tried to make my own highly legible high-contrast coding font using TensorFlow to fit things onto a high-resolution pixel grid based on a low-resolution draft. That way, characters align with the pixel grid (at the right scaling) which makes them appear much clearer.

https://hajo.me/images/HajoCode16px_hr.png

https://hajo.me/blog/2021/07/24/making-a-font-that-doesnt-su...

I am a big fan of Berkeley Mono. It has (for me at least) this really hard to describe fusion of retro and modern that just feels perfect for coding and console to me. Note: Unfortunately not free, but I did manage to figure out how to make it a static definition as part of my NixOS declarative configuration, lol.

https://berkeleygraphics.com/typefaces/berkeley-mono

Note that I just noticed that you can easily add Atkinson Hyperlegible Font to your Nix config, the package is called (unsurprisingly) `atkinson-hyperlegible`

Oh wow — I love Univers and Eurostile, makes Berkeley Mono a contender!

The other cool thing about it (not sure if this is common) is that you can customize your variety of the zero character and a few other characters that have debatable or preferential forms

I ended up forcing my browser to use Atkinson Hyperlegible for sans-serif text and Berkeley Mono for monospaced text and I may never change this config lol (although I wish I could force sites to use just the fonts, but not the fontsize settings, in Firefox...)

Glorious!

There are a number of very nice monospace typefaces that have lots of character variants so you can essentially pick and choose different letter styles (dotted, crossed or regular zeros, etc).

I personally love Fira Code with its ligatures.

I love Fira Code. I suspect Iosevka is the winner when it comes to customization though:

https://typeof.net/Iosevka/

You can basically mimic features of almost any other big name among monospace fonts.

The only downside I can think of is that it updates really often and the website doesn't have a way to save your customizations, so upgrading is a drag.

Given that it's a free font I'm not complaining though.

Yes, that's another great one!

I recently discovered Fira code through https://www.codingfont.com/. I played with font names off, and Fira code won two times in a row :) I'm still amazed at how pleasant it looks on my screen.

Oh, I didn't know of https://www.codingfont.com/, the tournament style competition is pretty cool. I also like that you can turn off the labels.

I've used Fira Code for years and tried to find an alternative on https://www.programmingfonts.org/ but it's very difficult comparing so many different options at once.

I use Atkinson for the browser things, and I personally recommend DejaVu Sans Mono. The rest of that font family is excellent as well.

Font preference is very subjective.

My personal fave is bitstream vers sans mono.

But the one that ships with pychcharm is really good, too.

well legibility is an objective, measurable characteristic

Python developer here seconding Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. I like having that tiny space between successive underlines, i.e. in things like

  def __init__(self, a, b, c)

Everyone has a favorite for clarity (mine is Andale Mono) but see the hyper-configurable https://typeof.net/Iosevka/ to make one your own.

Perhaps surprisingly, the ancient Monaco is still a good choice for development work. It has the key features of distinguishable 0/O and 1|Il. (Which you may not be able to distinguish here, depending on font choices).

Browsing around, the popular monospaced fonts for coding already have high distinction between glyphs like 8Bi1l.

Also 0/O and '` often matter. There are probably others that don't come to mind immediately.

Smaller bitmap fonts tend to be easy to distinguish. ... once you learn the patterns.

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