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JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

jetbrains.com

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Re: JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

#112

I like it, this might finally be the font that gets me to drop Fira Code. It's missing Powerline symbols, though, which is a strange omission for a developer font in 2020.

You could grab a patched copy here: https://www.nerdfonts.com/

Aside, I wish some ligature magic for box drawing characters existed. Or at least don’t skip those glyphs, which is unfortunately the case with many monospace fonts.

Re: JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

#114
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The character bugging me is the lowercase i - it looks like a little 1 with a dot on top if you can squint that hard, it's worse not better than DejaVu Sans which I use. (edit: the lowercase a is also rapidly gaining my dislike, it's all smashed up and looks weird)

If you're really using DejaVu Sans, that's a proportional font, so the difference to a "mono" font will be pretty big, especially for the usually narrow letters (i, j, l...) which have to be "padded" in mono fonts to avoid looking unbalanced (and, for coding, to make them easier to distinguish). Of course, if the other letters are as geometrically clean as in this font, the "i" will look a bit out of place. But actua…

I follow - the default system level (meaning without me tweaking it) fontconfig maps "Monospace Regular" to DejaVu Sans, not DejaVu Mono - so in reality, my "non mono" font is more readable to me (we all know this is subjective) than this actual mono font. I do map Courier to DejaVU Sans Mono in my own custom config, but never actually use that font - it's more for web rendering and stuff to look nice.

Outside of terminal windows and places where Monospace Regular is used automatically, I tend to use Luxi family as my font -- it used to be shipped with RHEL in the 90s, was removed due to license problems (or so I'm to believe) in one of the Fedora Core releases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxi_fonts

Re: JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL - I am pretty certain you can do most of those things with all fonts regardless of license. Copyrights on fonts is almost non-existent. The only thing copyrightable is the actual "code" used in the font. (maybe delivering their files on a website is an issue?) This is based on research I did years ago when dealing with a copyright legal case where I worked. The summation is that you can't copyright the alphabet…

That's interesting. Because most fonts are protected by a copyright-based license, that they don't seem to have any trouble enforcing. How extensive was your research?

The actual code of a font (ttf, otf, whatever) is copyrightable. The shape of a font isn't, and AFAIK it isn't protectable by any form of IP. This means that while you can't redistribute or embed the TTF you got from a type foundry except as specified by the license, you are free to use it to create a near-perfect knock-off that doesn't share any code. This is where the fonts on all of those "Free Fonts" websites come from.

Re: JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL - I am pretty certain you can do most of those things with all fonts regardless of license. Copyrights on fonts is almost non-existent. The only thing copyrightable is the actual "code" used in the font. (maybe delivering their files on a website is an issue?) This is based on research I did years ago when dealing with a copyright legal case where I worked. The summation is that you can't copyright the alphabet…

That's interesting. Because most fonts are protected by a copyright-based license, that they don't seem to have any trouble enforcing. How extensive was your research?

It's basically as they said: Typefaces are indeed not copyrightable in the United States, but fonts are, in the same way other as other code/binaries.

In practice, much of the likely infringement stems from the font and its existing choices for curves and control points (plus nowadays more advanced features of the font like ligatures and alternate forms), not the typeface, so it's not quite accurate to say there's no protection, and stuff like the Open Font License does exist for a reason.

Re: JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

#118

Can I control which weight is used in JetBrains IDEs for "bold" text? It looks to be using the bold font weight, when I'd prefer to use medium.

For multi-weight font they shows up as different font in the list. Fire Code light, Fire Code medium, ...

Re: JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

#119
post #82

I always applaud efforts at new typefaces, but unfortunately I feel this is a badly designed typeface that is worse for legibility, not better. Addressing their three main points in turn: > 1. Increased height for a better reading experience A high x-height is good for coding fonts, but this x-height is now too high. To my eye, this is now at the point where lowercase letters are getting harder to distinguish from up…

Serifs are easier to read the more pixels you have to work with. For a printed book at 3,000+ DPI, serifs are fine (though it's still possible to overdo them!). For a high-res monitor, microserifs like the ones Consolas uses can help if your text is not too small. This font was designed for small sizes, where anything except the cleanest lines will simply cause blurriness.

Are books really printed at 3000 DPI?

Re: JetBrains Mono: A free and open-source typeface for developers

#120
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just installed this font and tested it with VS Code, and I must say that it is a very nice font. Code is clear and easy to read (C/C++ development). I think I'll keep it for a while. Regarding ligatures, I agree. I could live with the pointer arrow ligature, that's fine and looks nice, but not with the crossed '=' (that is "!=") or the symbol for >=. Call it ageing, but for the moment it stops my code reading fl…

This is why I love how configurable editors are now days. I absolutely adore ligatures in my programming fonts. I've been using FiraCode for at least a year or 2 now, and while i'll be the first to admit that the reason I enabled ligatures was because they looked cool, now I really miss them when they aren't there.

I'd much rather see languages take advantage of characters outside of ASCII. There are already symbols such as ⇒ which could be used by a language.

This is a nice feature of APL, and the derivatives such as J which use plain ASCII are much less nice to work with.

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