from Hacker News

An innovative superfamily of fonts for code (2023)

by laex on 6/8/25, 12:15 AM with 15 comments

• by 0x69420 on 6/8/25, 2:28 AM

  i remember looking through these during a deep dive on type selection -- naturally radon, krypton, and arguably xenon come across as a bit gimmicky, argon has stiff competition in its genre as it's the rough style of most “modern” monospace faces, but neon is actually kind of spicy. this is the closest to the “mona” in “monaspace”, being similarly derived from helvetica and its ilk, and sits at just that right level of regularity that it's easy on the eyes after a long day in a way that i previously thought was only the purview of sf mono.

  if argon tickles your fancy, you might also be interested in fragment mono (https://github.com/weiweihuanghuang/fragment-mono) a similar free software “helvetica mono”.

  the tragedy of both argon and fragment mono, though, is that the latter comes in one width, and the former inexplicably supports obscenely wide proportions without letting you condense it down from the bog-standard 1x2ish. most condensed options out there are these pill-shaped straight-walled monstrosities that blur together (the iosevkas and pragmatas of the world), with a few notable exceptions (the old osdn releases of mplus).

  i wonder what would happen if you went in and extrapolated the width scaling for monaspace backwards into super narrow range.

• by ChrisArchitect on 6/8/25, 2:36 AM

  (2023) initial release

  Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210574

  Latest release 1.2 in February includes Nerd Fonts among other things. https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace/releases/tag/v1.200

• by KronisLV on 6/8/25, 8:54 AM

  Personally, I really liked using Liberation Mono (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts) or Google Cousine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croscore_fonts) because their readability at smaller font sizes is really good and they're not too hard on the eyes.

  I also quite enjoyed PT Mono (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PT_Fonts) for similar reasons, except for some reason the full stop character (.) was way too small on the smaller font sizes, which is annoying enough to prevent me from daily driving it.

  Somewhere in the middle of it all, I experimented with the Terminus font (https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/) though as you'll see in the linked page, there is a special version of it that's been converted to TTF and it only looks good at very specific sizes, which isn't always what you want, despite me actually really enjoying the font.

  Eventually, I just settled on JetBrains Mono (https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/) because it was free, came as the default for the JetBrains IDEs (it's annoying to change the fonts for like 7-8 installed IDEs) and wasn't hard to set as the default for the rest of the programs either.

  I've always just wanted to have a font that's easy on the eyes and lets me be productive, though nowadays I'm also thinking about whether light/dark themes might be more helpful (e.g. on Windows, the SourceTree light theme actually looks better than the dark one, so it's also a matter of good dark themes like in JetBrains vs just okay ones like in SourceTree).

  Always nice to see more options for fonts, though! Really nice site design, too, I have to admit.

• by 9d on 6/8/25, 2:56 AM

  I have not cared about fonts for years.

  Then I made a toy font in pico8 just to see how small I could get it.

  It eventually evolved into a 3x4 font[1] named crt34.

  When playing with Shiki for the docs website, I found Fira Code.

  Now I'm using Fira Code in all my code samples and in VS Code.

  I'm surprised by how very quickly I got used to Fira Code.

  In under a day I was at a point where I forgot I had it enabled.

  And I really do love how it renders => and -> and !== and === etc.

  [1] https://os.90s.dev/#sys/apps/fontmaker.app.js@sys/data/crt34...

• by tmtvl on 6/8/25, 9:23 AM

  No CJK support? Guess I'm gonna stick to IBM Plex, then (my other options are Adobe's Source and Google's Noto, but Plex has medium weight, which looks decent when I don't have stem darkening enabled in my Freetype properties).

• by danhau on 6/8/25, 7:26 AM

  I like the idea of unique faces for doc and „tentative“ comments. However, after having used Iosevka, nothing comes close to its amazing italic face. It‘s so good. My dream font would be Berkeley Mono with Iosevka‘s italic.

• by jhanschoo on 6/10/25, 2:39 AM

  I'm excited for this concept, but I won't start using it until at least VSC implements support that allows the use of multiple related fonts in different contexts to achieve it's potential.

  Arguably, this is not a completely novel idea, outside of this context. In traditional publishing it is of course already common to see different contexts set in different typefaces.

• by RadiozRadioz on 6/8/25, 11:51 AM

  In all of them except "Krypton", 1 and l are almost indistinguishable

• by BugsJustFindMe on 6/8/25, 4:10 AM

  The Radon (handwriting) lowercase l looks an awful lot like uppercase Z. It's so obvious too. I can't take a "font for code" seriously when the designers don't see glaring symbol ambiguities.

• by 9d on 6/8/25, 2:59 AM

  Wow. These actually have style while being monospaced!

  And I can actually see myself using them! That's very rare.

  I'm going to try each of these out over the next 5 days.

  Starting with Radon. An italic-first pretty monospace font? Yes please!

• by ac130kz on 6/8/25, 6:24 AM

  I switched to Monaspace Argon as default, it's a tiny bit more variative compared to JetBrains Mono, which enchances its readability without going full crazy.