Berkeley Mono v1.008 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33614114 - Nov 2022 (2 comments)
Show HN: Berkeley Mono Typeface - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30557557 - March 2022 (171 comments)
Windows, 1920 x 1200 @ 96 dpi, Visual Studio, light-on-dark theme. I like 'em small to fit more on the screen and at 8px this font looks janky. It is blurry with uneven thickness and requires an eye strain to read. It doesn't seem to be hinted at all even though it is a TTF version.
Here's Berkley Mono on the left and Mensch on the right - https://i.imgur.com/CM27hVV.png
At 9px characters somehow retain their width but just get taller.
At 10px it starts looking better, but glyphs still look kinda feeble and aren't terribly pleasant to look at.
Just 2c. The character design is very nice still.
Liberation Mono: from the very same package of fonts that are included in LibreOffice, I find it to be surprisingly readable and easy on the eyes for most kinds of code or monospaced text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts
PT Mono: while initially I really liked PT Sans and PT Serif separately (they're currently the fonts for my homepage/blog), their monospaced offering is also quite nice; albeit when there's some light colored text (e.g. comments) at the smaller font sizes, the full stop character can become a bit harder to see. Here's more information about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PT_Fonts
Here's a quick comparison, comparing the two fonts against Consolas and JetBrains Mono (with some Java code, taken from a throwaway project): https://imgur.com/a/mr9afqT
Personally, out of all of them Liberation Mono feels like the most readable, whereas PT Mono just appeals to me stylistically on some level. However, paid fonts, like the linked one are also great - whatever feels more pleasant to stare at for a large number of hours per day!
I really like a broken vertical bar. There's been a fight, where it became a solid vertical bar, then a broken vertical bar again, then a solid bar again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_bar
See the "Solid vertical bar vs broken bar" section.
Because mathematical "OR" and all that IIUC. But I don't care. I'm in control. So my monospace font use a broken vertical bar (and a taller one than what's usually seen too, there's no risk of mistaking my "broken bar" '|' with '!'). When I write "my" font, it's literally a font I made myself by using FontForge slightly modifying another font (I basically modified @$%&|l and a few other tiny details). I cannot distribute it though.
EDIT: funnily enough reading that Wikipedia article I posted, I checked my keyboards... Two of them, an old IBM Model M and a "not so old but still old" Sun keyboard do both have a broken bar printed as the vertical bar: I never realized that!
In short, we think 1 keypress = 1 symbol printed on the screen. That explicitness brings peace. But, we also think that ligatures are optional and many people like them (read about all the pros and cons in the link above).
That makes everyone happy.
The Liberation font don't look bad but their wideness as well as that of other common FOSS fonts like the Vera/Bitstream fonts has always bugged me for some reason. Whenever I do a fresh Linux install and the desktop is configured to use one of those I have to download and install Inter UI or Ubuntu Sans as the UI font for it to not bug me.
[0]: https://philpl.gumroad.com/l/dank-mono [1]: https://rsms.me/inter/ [2]: https://design.ubuntu.com/font
This is what Berkeley Graphics says about it in the article that is linked:
>Nerd Fonts: We don't mind our customers patching the typeface. We respect your ownership of the typeface. However, Nerd Fonts are put together [haphazardly](https://www.nerdfonts.com/#home_) from several difference sources, kind of destroys our typeface's cohesiveness: We do not endorse it, we don't provide support to do this. It is a bad idea despite of its questionable usefulness. They're popular though and if you don't mind breaking the aesthetic uniformity of our typefaces, please go for it.
However, the difficulty of distinguishing italics from regular on a presentation I can mostly forgive it since I can now recognize the italics and that hint to whatever it is trying to show much more easily than if I was trying to figure out a color (I'm not color blind but that is an accessibility issue) or the 'is that tilted enough?'
(and looking for a bit of nostalgia, https://dank.sh/ now redirects to https://philpl.gumroad.com/l/dank-mono and while its done, it can be purchased again!)
I’ll have to try it. I’m still using Lucida Console because most newer fonts lack hinting for smaller sizes.
https://fsd.it/wp-content/uploads/PragmataPro_bitmaps.gif
To me, this is one of the best parts of Pragmata Pro (which I also eventually bought and has been my daily driver for years, although I do use Berkeley Mono for presentations and screenshots...)
Ohh, that's a fair point. I guess it's very obvious in the comparison, when you look at something like Consolas and any of the others.
I've heard good things about Iosevka, when you care a lot about horizontal compactness: https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
In fact I would've loved to try a mono version of it if it were avaiable.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/ViewSonic-VX2722-4K-OLED-27-in...
As far as 8px fonts go, there's also Dina, which is very similar, but with a pixelated look even though it's a TTF.
Hate to poop on others hard work, but i think Fira Code looks much better. The missing one i found might be critical for Clojurists, could be patched in FC.
