Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives

monolisa.dev

190 pointsbebraw93 comments

Originally we (Andrey, Marcus, Juho) built MonoLisa in 2020 as we realised there's room for a better monospaced typeface for developers. The key insight was to make the glyphs slightly wider to make more room for design to make letters like m feel less cramped.

Since then we've released a variable v2 (2022) and now we're happy to expand the typeface with a new family called MonoLisa Text. The reasoning was to cover *other* use cases beyond coding with this proportional font.

We hope you give Monolisa a go as there's a free trial to try. We also welcome feedback!

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I'm more of a bitmap font guy (at least, as long as my eyes continue to forgive me for it) but I'm always interested to see what other fonts there are around. It does look quite nice.

I must admit when I ran across the second real paragraph from the main page, I couldn't help but only think more and more about how we will look back on marketing copy like this in a decade from now:

AI assistants produce both code and prose. MonoLisa Text renders long-form explanations with optimal readability, while MonoLisa Code keeps your code crystal clear. The perfect pairing for the AI era. (Under the title "A perfect pairing for the AI era.")

Ignoring the deep pit of sadness I felt when thinking about the incredibly long (and revolutionary) history of typefaces that led us to today for just a moment, I'm honestly curious how effective this marketing is. How many people would assume a font would be suitable for general text but not LLM-generated text and would need to be dissuaded from that notion? I wonder if someone has started selling keyboards that are "perfect for prompting" (but I'm too scared to look at this stage).

I think a lot of people might be excited by a typeface or other text system that would highlight tells of LLM "tainted" text.

> I wonder if someone has started selling keyboards that are "perfect for prompting"

I don't know about such marketing copy, but keyboards with a "CoPilot key" are now standard, particularly on all Windows laptops, which is an even more egregious form of marketing.

The "Windows laptop special key" is a bit of a meme. Microsoft keeps changing it every few years to the new hot thing and it never catches on. It feels like "we have Command key at home".

I have never seen a Windows laptop with the right ctrl key, or any normal key, replaced by a special key before CoPilot. I have six Windows laptops spread over 20 years and all of them before my most recent one have normal keys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menu_key is all I can think of, but that was introduced in 1994...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_key

Just imagine how much an authentic keyboard with a Clippy icon would fetch, to the right buyer that is.

Cmd and Ctrl being separate keys is legitimately one of the things that keeps me on macOS.

Cmd and ctl are separate on Windows as well. Option is the Windows key.

I've taken recently to running bitmap Terminus (not the ttf) in my terminals. I find the lack of blurred edges to be extremely refreshing. My laptop has a pixel density of about 162 ppi, so normal fonts, especially in chrome on linux don't make me happy.

Do you recommend any specific bitmap coding fonts?

Unless you're stuck on an annoying platform you could try adjusting the hinting.

Contrary to Apple's insistence, hidpi doesn't mean blurring the edges of fonts is okay.

I use Cozette[1] at the moment, which is basically a modern form of Dina (the first bitmap font I started with ~15 years ago now). It is pretty nice, though they recently started adding some kanji and I don't particularly like the style they went with (maybe I should send a PR to support more and fix up the existing styles)...

[1]: https://github.com/the-moonwitch/Cozette

Tamzen

$149 for a font for personal computer use is kind of steep! I would pay $20 for this, but the value has to be pretty high to pay $149 when there's a huge selection of free fonts on nerdfonts.com, of which many are pretty great. Like what does this font really offer that makes it so pricey?

I bought Operator Mono circa 2020 for even more — still rocking it today. Seems like a no big deal for a thing you keep looking at for many hours every day.

kiliman/operator-mono-lig on github patches it to support ligatures. And I wish Hoefler guys added support for more languages

Video and some code screenshots: https://typography.com/blog/introducing-operator

Character set: https://typography.com/fonts/operator/overview

I get a redirect loop on both of your links.

Something on your side

I bought the first version for far less. I couldn’t believe how much they wanted this time around.

If you’re going to stare at it year in and year out, getting the best fit for yourself is worthwhile. I shelled out for PragmataPro ages ago and have no regrets there.

I have bought Berkeley Mono back in the day, and I use it everywhere, everyday. One of the best purchases I did ever.

Free fonts are nice, but some paid options are polished to a different level.

See: https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono

There's plenty of "free" very well made fonts, though Intel didn't get Intel One Mono for free, nor did Google get Noto for free.

I used Hack, Iosevka, Adobe's Source Code Pro and more for a very long time and was very happy about all.

I also use Inter heavily in my Obsidian setup, and I'm very happy about it, too.

However, sometimes one item speaks to you more than the others. It's not about free vs. paid. It's more about finding something more useful than others, and the difference justifies the price tag on it.

In that sense, Monolisa is not my cup of tea design-wise, but I have friends who absolutely love it, and I understand them.

Looks interesting.

> The Licensee may not modify, translate, adapt, alter, decompile, disassemble, decrypt, reverse engineer, change or alter the embedding bits, the font name, legal notices contained in the font software, nor seek to discover the source code of the font data, convert into another font format, create bitmaps, add or subtract any glyphs, symbols or accents, or any other derivative works based on the electronic data in this product.

This is why I haven’t bought it. I like to subset fonts to reduce the size. Any font license that prohibits this just gets ignored by me, no matter how good it is.

I asked around about this particular term. It seems it's strict like that because looser wording would allow resales in certain parts of the world.

That said, I see no problem in subsetting or customizing the font especially in personal context. The website even provides tooling for this purpose so it's definitely within the license since you are literally creating your own custom version on the fly.

I hope this clarifies why it seems to be a standard clause for fonts.

IANAL, but isn't most of that unenforceable in the US? Typefaces have their own weird place in IP law which is different from copyright.

IANAL but the distributed files are software and I do not interpret that section to be unenforceable. If you agree to the EULA then subset the font and serve it on your website it's pretty straightforward to enforce.

AIUI in the US you can't do much to protect the visual shape of the font e.g. I can hand-trace your letters and make my own font and do whatever I want without issue.

Yeah, sounds like you can't even screenshot it.

> MonoLisa ships as a variable font with two axes. Weight gives you every cut from Thin to Black in a single file — no megabytes per style. Grade fine-tunes typographic color by adjusting stroke thickness without changing glyph widths

If any web page designer reads this, weight 1 and grade -50 is what many web pages look like, or even thinner than that. Weight 300 and grade 0 are the lower boundary of readability IMO.

A free (as money) font with most of those properties is Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, both monospace and variable width. https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/

Thanks for this alternate!

Atkinson Hyperlegible is an incredible font family! I read much faster and strain much less when I use it. The Braille Institute licenses it under SIL and includes the Glyphs 3 source files used to build it with the download too which is very cool.

Looks decent but $250 AUD for a font? Even for local and personal use? That's... a lot. I was thinking if it is paid and it was around $25 I'd consider it, then I saw the price!

Yeah, I've read the entire website, but I still don't understand how a font for programming can be worth that much.

It's something you'll be looking at for perhaps 8 hours a day for years. If you actually use it, a font is easily worth that much, even disregarding its potential use in a commercial product.

Of course, like open source software, free fonts do their best to undercut the market for individual professionals to make a living, but creating fonts isn't free.

>It's something you'll be looking at for perhaps 8 hours a day for years. If you actually use it, a font is easily worth that much

I mean, what are you comparing against? Rendering text in the null font? Sure, if that's really all you have then I guess spend $250 on an actual font, but even VGA is perfectly serviceable for a lot of tasks, and I'm not sure this font is $250 better than VGA, let alone something like DejaVu or what have you.

>creating fonts isn't free

At this point we should ask if it was necessary to create another font in the first place.

> I mean, what are you comparing against? Rendering text in the null font?

No, I'm comparing against "whatever the default is". It's the same with chairs or beds. You can get "something to sit on" or "something to lay on" for $0 or close to it. But I will gladly pay a premium for the same reason - I spend 8+ hours a day in a chair, and 8+ hours a day in bed, so I don't even blink at paying any price to improve my daily QOL for years to come. Even if it's only by a little bit, a little bit of QOL over thousands of hours is an investment in your own happiness.

> At this point we should ask if it was necessary to create another font in the first place.

There's plenty of room for more fonts to exist. I have yet to find a monospaced coding font I like with Japanese support, and would gladly pay $250 if I found one.

Eh. To each his own. If it's about making improvements, I'm sure I could think of something to spend $250 on that would be more effective than a font, speaking for myself. There is such a thing as good enough, for me.

The comparison doesn't add up, frankly. There are number of free fonts which work awesome for coding. In your terms, it's like I have an excellent chair already, not just "something to sit on".

That's a bit of a false comparison - does this font significantly improve your quality of life comparably to a cheaper/open source font? Is this font really that much better than Jetbrains mono?

Why not pay $10,000 for a font if you are spending 8 hours a day looking at text? Probably because that's a obscene price to pay for a font.

I think the problem is that competition in this area is fierce, so as soon as I see a font like this with such an expensive personal use license - my first thought is - is this really going to be a unique experience compared to the quality of open source fonts?

Yes - fonts arent free - and obviously they're going for a market that will want to spend $250 on a personal font - but if so, I don't think the marketing works for achieving this

JetBrains Mono does make it very hard to justify spending anything more than nothing on a good font though.

I can't figure out why this font is better than DejaVu Mono, or Monaco (mac). They all look basically the same to me. I actually would love someone to explain what the difference/improvement is, in other parts of life I know subtle changes add up.

Classic marketing pricing strategy. Suddenly what has been seen as cheap is now given airs of luxury, exclusivity and craftsmanship.

If you are really serious about your work… and you are, aren’t you? Then $150 is nothing, it’s a reflection on how serious you are. An artist needs great tools… etc etc

There are artist in 3rd world countries that make that in a month.

Then they aren't the target audience of this particular Rolex.

Seems there's no way to disable the <= ligature without disabling whitespace ligatures? I'm not all too crazy for real ligatures but whitespace adjustments otherwise seem nice.

Also, as it's so finely adjustable, would love if they'd offer some variants for dot and comma, to increase their size, because that's my number one problem with fonts since age 45.

Can you open an issue at https://github.com/MonoLisaFont/feedback/issues ? Maybe that's something we missed while restructuring ligatures for customizability.

Saw there's an issue already about the <= ligature. Will open a second issue with feature request for bigger dots.

I call all these new fonts monofonts, mono in the sense of monoculture. Aesthetics practically indistinguishable from each other. Give me one of the IBM Selectric fonts in a modern form and I'll be happy as a clam.

https://www.codingfont.com/ is a fun way to compare fonts side by side and see just how similar some of them really are. Also kind of fun to see if your favorite font makes it through a blind comparison bracket.

You might like Pitch: https://klim.co.nz/fonts/pitch/

Nice but pricey with a restrictive license.

Similar to Input Mono font, which is superior to Monolisa in pretty much any way I can think of, plus free. https://input.djr.com/

I find them quite different, to be honest. I would not call them similar at all apart from being in the same design space of fonts for displaying code.

Regarding coding, the characters “:={” are all vertically centered differently.

Bought MonoLisa back in 2022, never even considered switching coding typeface since. Before that time I used to switch every 3-6 months.

It's really well balanced easy on the eye.

Looks good. Won't ever buy a font though.

Font claims to support Bulgarian Cyrillic but in fact supports the Russian one, which is different and very often overlooked as the same by font designers.

Created an account, to come tell you folk, just how much I love Monolisa. Have been using it every since they launched, in both my terminal, and my code editors.

It’s lovely!

editing to add: They even have PPP pricing! Which as someone living in India, I highly appreciate, since it puts a lovely piece of art within reach.

20k (30$) for font for someone living in India is too much to ask.

It looks like they do pricing parity for different countries. Being in South Africa it shows a 40% discount available.

I'm in spain using DIGI (a romanian telco) - their geolocation puts me into romania and offer a 40% discount.

Anyway, still not going to pay 75€+ for a font.

To everbody complaining about the huge price of $149. For a font pricing thats pretty normal.

Maybe coders aren't the usual targeting group but print media is paying plenty of cash for typo licenses.

Commercial usage is almost always significantly more expensive than retail. Software is the same way. I don't think it's common for personal use fonts to charge that much though.

I have used MonoLisa for a few years now as my terminal and editor font and I absolutely love it. It was a fair bit cheaper when I bought it (80 Euro IIRC), but was well-worth it!

Umm... Who would pay $149 to use a font? Maybe I'm not enough of a typography nerd, but I find the free choices (JetBrains Mono, Iosevka, Fira Code, ...) quite enough.

The free choices are fine, but I've just upgraded to v3 for both Code + Text because I genuinely like how MonoLisa is built compared with the others you've listed. I like the width, I like the descenders, I like the terminals, I like the ligatures (I don't have to go looking for some NF font variant) -- I guess I'm a typogrpahy nerd? (Probably, as I can see Bringhurst and Stocks to my left.)

I don't know if you've looked at the cost of other fonts, but $149 is very much on the "cheaper" end. And it's worth it to me to have a font I like looking at, as I'll be looking at it all day every day. Better yet if you're someone who enjoys the ones you listed. It just so happens that out of the list of 4, MonoLisa appeals to me the most.

I got so used to how narrow Iosevka is that I think I'd find it challenging to find a replacement at this point. Any other typefaces that are on the narrower side?

You can download the web version for free here:

https://github.com/braver/programmingfonts/tree/gh-pages/fon...

There's probably a way to convert those to TTF or something else if you need it.

Yeah no thanks. Absolutely ludicrous price, especially when there's so many amazing free fonts available.

I have used MonoLisa for more than 6 years now (I was one of the first early users!) and it's still my favorite font to this day! It's the best. I particularly like how wide it is for teaching and sharing screens. It's really legible and nice!

Title: "a typeface for developers"

> and now we're happy to expand the typeface with a new family called MonoLisa Text. The reasoning was to cover other use cases beyond coding with this proportional font.

Dumb question, when should a developer not use a monospaced font? I.e. when should they use MonaLisa Text

I'm sure I'm missing the obvious, but it is purely for LLM output use cases as the website implies (in which case why isn't Claude approach of using a serif font a better strategy).

Please don't take my comments are negative. Just genuinely curious, which is why I'm asking.

> Dumb question, when should a developer not use a monospaced font? I.e. when should they use MonaLisa Text

When I get back to work, I’ll try it out on my markdown editor.

The "code" version:

  Capital "i" has crossbars? CHECK

  Zero is distinguishable from O? CHECK

"Text" version:

  Capital "i" has crossbars? NOPE, so no dice.

I hate fonts that don't have a properly-formed capital "i".

In sans-serif text typefaces capital ‘I’ is traditionally a simple vertical rectangle without serifs. But we were estimating some folks would miss those serifs so if you want to have a ‘properly-formed’ capital ‘I’ just activate stylistic set 02 (ss02, = ‘Alt I J i j r’). To see what this looks like, take a look here: https://www.monolisa.dev/tester/text

Thanks for the reply, and that option. Pretty cool!

But the crossbars aren't serifs!

You are correct. But the letter ‘I’ never has crossbars, no matter what font you are looking at. If you mean the horizontal stem, that is a serif.

I adore MonoLisa, thank you for all the effort that's gone into making it and congratulations on the new release!

That c is opinionated. Either one likes it or explicitly doesn't. I doubt there's an in-between.

The Sans versions has Signika vibes, I like it, but the price was enough of a showstopper for me.

I love this font. I think it is probably the only coding font I have ever actually purchased.

Same! It's also one of my favorite UNIX puns (up there with pine).

I can't figure this out from the website, does the text variant have tabular figures?

for the Monolisa folks here, I’d love to know too.

Activating stylistic set 01 (= script variant) does not effect the look of figures. You can try it out here on our website: https://www.monolisa.dev/tester/code

In a world where Fira Code, Hack, JetBrains Mono, and like a zillion others (of equal, if not greater, quality) are offered for free, this is obviously a pure marketing play and it's sad we live in a world where even fucking fonts are so heavily monetized.

Is it possible to get this for free? I know there’s a free option but I don’t understand what the limits are

The free trial version has a couple of fixed weights to try. It's missing all the advanced features (variable weight etc.) but it's enough to get an impression and to use it on a daily basis to see if you like it.

https://github.com/braver/programmingfonts/tree/gh-pages/fon...

Absolutely amazing name.

terminal GUI about to get a better upgrade :)

I mean, it's a nice font but that's a bit steep. The site thinks I'm from Mongolia for whatever reason, I don't even have a VPN on atm.

Look nice but super expensive for the normal developer. Good luck with the monetization, hope you get some company customers.

Looks lovely!

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