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Comment by torgeros | Hacker News Reader

Knowing that everything in here is people asking why their font is missing: I highly recommend having a look at

[ MAPLE MONO ]

(on Github https://github.com/subframe7536/Maple-font). It has amazing readability, looks nice, is compatible with NF if you use that. I received compliments from people looking over my shoulder for my f'ing font?! Huge shoutout to subframe7536 ^^

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Italics turn into cursive... I cannot imagine ever wanting this in my IDE, but that's just me.

I know right?! And apparently only certain letters become cursive in italic, so it's not even consistent about it?!

This seems bizarre to me, I do not understand the rationale behind it. Can someone enlighten me?

"Italic" does not merely mean "slanted".

Aah, it also means "inconsistent", does it?

(the term you were looking for is "oblique", btw)

While we're dropping lesser-known coding fonts, here's my favorite, Lotion [0]. It's cute and playful but also very legible and clean.

[0] https://font.nina.coffee/

This one has a bit of... an Art Deco flavor, perhaps, is it?

First Maple and now this. Today is good day for trying new fonts.

personally love collletttivo's necto mono: https://www.collletttivo.it/typefaces/necto-mono

The slant and connective distance of the cursive italic l are noticeably different than of the other letters, so every word that includes one is very jarring.

It looks like they naively aligned the slant of the leftmost edge at the mid-height of the glyph, which is not the right way to optically align shapes, especially for a symbol with asymmetric curvature (the leading face of the loop leans substantially more than the trailing face). And then in addition to that, a too-wide arrangement when adjoining ("ul", "ll", etc) causes excess dead space around adjoined pairs.

You see this quite strongly in the "null" that appears on line 5 in their example screenshot. The two "l"s both appear to lean more than the "nu", and the "ul" has more internal space than the "nu", and the "ll" has even more than that.

I don’t like it. It looks amateurish in the same way Comic Sans looks to me. I suppose you’d love this if you also enjoy Comic Sans.

It feels more like Consolas to me.

Consolas at least looks like a serious type face. This one has letterforms so rounded that it screams playful without any seriousness.

No way, I'm sticking with Comic Mono: https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/

I've been a long time Fira Code user, but recently switched to Maple - I love it. Mostly because of the "single storey" `a`, but that's just a personal preference of mine.

Fira Code does have a "single storey" a. You can activate it by passing the "cv01" feature flag to your text editor of choice. (If the text editor supports otf font features)

For more info: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/wiki/How-to-enable-stylis...

Thanks for the tip! I really need to look into these feature flags some more to understand how they work. I noticed that the Inter font has similar flags too.

Checked it out and instantly liked it. Been using Cascadia Code for years. Will give this one a try now. Thank you!

What do you like about it? I like that the I and l are distinctive, and of course the distinction between 0 and O. However, there are some nice letter differentiators that it is missing, such as a shorter middle cane in the letter "m" (Ubuntu Mono has this for example).

That dollar sign is awful. I kinda dig some parts of this, but my brain simply doesn't parse that as a dollar sign; it requires extra thought to recognize it.

Woa, that's a weird @ in the screenshot in line 6.

I had to look very hard at the line to recognise it as an @ because it's so weird.

Incredibly jarring lowercase 'a' in that. Far too prominent to the point of affecting readability.

Seconding Maple Mono - it's very nice.

> Nice

< Look at the tasteful colouring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God.

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