Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

jetbrains.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 207 posts

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

#151

Post by Pxtl »

boutad wrote: post #147
Pxtl wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, many fonts use double story 'a' for roman and single story 'ɑ' for italic. Calibri, Segoe UI, Times New Roman, Droid Serif, Merriweather, Consolas, and Source Sans Pro are examples I found from quick searching.

... wow, how did I get this far in life without noticing that. a a a a. Edit: Apparently Verdana doesn't seem to do that.

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

#153

Post by pkalinowski »

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…

What would be the font you can recommend?

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

#154

Post by Syzygies »

To install in VS Code, one edits Settings - Commonly Used - Editor: Font Family.

It would appear that one needs the Font Family name, which one can guess. To be sure in all cases, I made a MacOS alias:

  alias fonts="system_profiler SPFontsDataType | grep 'Family:' | perl -pe 's|^.*Family: ||' | sort -u"
However, how does one select weights, such as defaulting to

  JetBrains Mono Medium
It turns out that one can enter a raw font file name in place of the family, such as

  JetBrainsMono-Medium
However, any formatting that selects a different style, such as italics, will default to the family. So for example, italic comments are rendered for me in regular not medium weight. I'm fine with this, but it's a quirk that can only be fixed by spelunking into the individual syntax highlighting files.

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

#155

Post by redisman »

Grumbledour wrote: post #47
nkrisc wrote: post #2

I was disappointed that despite presenting the cookie banner as if it were a terminal, the options did not accept keyboard input [Y]es, I agree [N]o, thanks Ok on topic: I'm never sure what to think of these "developer" fonts that make use of ligatures for combinations like ==, >=, ->, =>, etc. On one hand they do look really nice, but I always can't help but feel it would actually make things just a little bit harde…

I do love the ligatures in Fira Code. It always makes me happy to see the nice looking =, !=, !== or ->. I am not so sure about these, though. Maybe a tad to much/to special in some cases? Somehow they don't pop for me the same way.

Also === in JS and TS turning into three horizontal lines is really nice for my brain (even though lint catches it). Fira coda retina is still my go-to font, this one doesn't look quite as legible.

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

#156

Post by redisman »

npongratz wrote: post #71
java-man wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of ligatures seems counter-productive to me. In the code, I do not want to see any editor shenanigans apart from syntax highlighting.

I agree completely. When I see ligatures, I have to mentally stop and wonder what the actual characters are "underneath". So annoying.

It only took me a few weeks to get used to it and now it' annoying to not have them. The math ones are especially nice since I always had a little bit of trouble remembering the order of gte and lte. Now I get immediate visual feedback that's very clear (just like in the math books).

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

#157

Post by bmn__ »

holtalanm wrote: post #78

I'll stick with DejaVu Sans Mono, thanks.

"143 languages", says the homepage. That's an attempt to take us for a ride. JB Mono does not actually cover very much, see table below. We should stick with DejaVu Sans Mono so that multilingual text does not look like glyph salad.

----

fontforge → Element → Font properties… → Unicode Ranges

Non-Unicode Glyphs 159/0

Unassigned Code Points U+0000-U+11FFFF 2/0

Basic Multilingual Plane U+0000-U+FFFF 481/61780

C0 Control Characters U+0000-U+001F 2/0

Basic Latin U+0020-U+007E 95/95

Latin-1 Supplement U+00A0-U+00FF 94/96

Latin Extended-A U+0100-U+017F 128/128

Latin Extended-B U+0180-U+024F 6/208

Spacing Modifier Letters U+02B0-U+02FF 9/80

Greek and Coptic U+0370-U+03FF 2/135

Cyrillic U+0400-U+04FF 94/256

Latin Extended Additional U+1E00-U+1EFF 6/256

General Punctuation U+2000-U+206F 16/111

Superscripts and Subscripts U+2070-U+209F 7/42

Currency Symbols U+20A0-U+20CF 1/32

Letterlike Symbols U+2100-U+214F 5/80

Mathematical Operators U+2200-U+22FF 14/256

Geometric Shapes U+25A0-U+25FF 1/96

Alphabetic Presentation Forms U+FB00-U+FB4F 2/58

Latin Ligatures U+FB00-U+FB06 2/7

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

#158

Post by gecko »

core-questions wrote: post #146
Seenso wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of the details they spent so much effort on didn't make any sense to me as to why that particular design detail would be important. IMHO, fonts have been studied too deeply for too long for some graphic designer at J. Random Corporation to be able to easily make improvements. In situations like that, most changes and new ideas end up being regressions.

Consider how many new hacker fonts we've seen on here in the past year or so. Is there really that much unexplored terrain in this landscape?

We’ve seen a large upgrade due to the increasing interest in ligatured programming fonts that are optimized for Retina display. In that context, maybe: this is really the third entrant after Fira Code and Cascadia. But I doubt it.

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

#159

Post by eric_cc »

I spent more time than I'd like to admit reviewing fonts for legibility and aesthetics. So if you're looking for a new favorite font, hope this helps:

1. IBM Plex Mono

2. Office Code Pro

3. Fira Code

4. Inconsolata

5. PT Mono

6. SF Mono

7. Input Mono

8. Hack

9. DejaVu Sans Mono - Bront

10. Anonymous Pro

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

#160

Post by threatofrain »

Lendal wrote: post #56
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…

A lot of the details they spent so much effort on didn't make any sense to me as to why that particular design detail would be important. I don't care about vertical alignment of letter shape details. If I need lowercase letters to look bigger, I almost always also need uppercase bigger too, so I'll just increase the font size +1 pt. I use three different fonts in terminals, editors and IDEs. So I'm sure this font wi…

In contrast to Operator Mono I'd also advise peeking at Fantasque Sans Mono and Victor Mono as Operator-lites.
Post reply on HN