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

Post by dtertman » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

therealdrag0 wrote: post #131

dtertman wrote: post #21

Thanks, I hate it. My most recent update of IntelliJ turned this font on by default and I had to spend an hour trying to figure out what the font used to be. Mono looked squished to me - the intentional favoring of length over width made the whole editor look like I had an aspect ratio problem on my monitor. I appreciate trying to push the envelope and improve ergonomics, but I wish this would have been opt-in for up…

My font didn't change (Still Fira Code), but the look of the text changed in last update. Hard to put my finger on. Some of the text looks more blurry, and I'm noticing more bold than before, but I can't tell if that's mismemory or not.

Post by xwowsersx » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

1kGarand wrote: post #88

crazygringo wrote: post #38

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…

Over the last 10-15 years or so, I’ve tried so many of these new fonts but always just end up back to DejaVu Sans Mono Bold. Now that my eyes are getting older, it works even better. On a Mac, Menlo looks nearly identical.

Post by alexk7 » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

Post by boutad » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 6:06 PM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #125

rplnt wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I misread 'a's as 'o's in the example provided. Probably result of all three points combined...

I'm super confused, are the using a... well, I don't know the terms, but a fancy "a" for the straight face and a simple "a" that's the circle-bar O|-shaped "a" for italics? Is that common in fonts and I never noticed before?

Post by boutad » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

lokedhs wrote: post #120

Klathmon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.