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Berkeley Mono Typeface

berkeleygraphics.com

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Re: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#101

Post by inferiorhuman »

catlover76 wrote: post #87

It's not just free? Instead it's $75 for an individual "license" and they sell enterprise licenses? Seems quite out of line with the vibe they portray the font embodies

No, it's not free. Fonts are incredibly labor intensive and require both artistic and technical skill. $75 for a family of well designed fonts pretty much at the bottom of the barrel for paid fonts. Check out the pricing for a single variant of something like Helvetica or FF Meta some time. A single family may very well be someone's entire life's work. Same reason that you get paid to bang on a keyboard while open source exists.

That said I've not bought Berkeley Mono, and probably won't (mostly because the style isn't quite to my current taste). I've bought fonts in the past, typically drawing the piracy line when I make money from a font (e.g. letterhead, business cards). Over the past two decades the list includes: Bell Centennial and Bell Gothic (great at small sizes), FF Meta and FF Zwo (for copy), and FF Mister K (uses ligatures to create a more organic looking handwriting font).

Much like with other software there are great free alternatives that pop up every once in a while on HN when the topic of coding fonts comes up. Fira Code (by Erik Spiekermann of FF fame), Plex (IBM), Source Code (Adobe), Cascadia (Microsoft), and JetBrains Mono (duh). Notice that they're all backed by large orgs — again, fonts are a ton of work. Contrast that with something like B612 (Airbus) which is cool but also basically abandonware and lacks the fit and finish of the previous fonts.

If you want the retro vibe and are okay pirating abandonware, the guy at int10h.org maintains a collection of fonts scraped from vintage ROMs[0]. But again these lack the polish you may be used to as they're way out of their element on modern systems.

Me? I'm currently using M+ Code 60[1] (Coji Morishita backed by Google) as a daily driver[2]. I'm enamored with its slightly quirky style (just enough to keep me interested) and its legibility as a console font.

0: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/

1: https://mplusfonts.github.io

2: https://i.imgur.com/AG2IbT0.png

Re: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#103

Post by kstrauser »

jen729w wrote: post #97
kstrauser wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you on the general principle. That said, software is kind of an odd duck in that huge amounts of valuable code are just given away for free to whomever wants it. How much would you pay for a shell? A better ls command? A mailserver? All of those require considerable effort to create, and yet people have made wonderful implementations of each of those and said here ya go, have it, enjoy! I can understand…

> I can understand the skepticism against a paid font. Me too! But that's not what upset me. What upset me was the assumption of deceit in the parent post. It's like drive-by shootings here sometimes; people see a thing, they don't like it, and they assume that the person creating it therefore has bad motives. I've been on the receiving end, directly, and it stinks. It makes this place worse.

I’m with you. You don’t like a thing that other people do? Nod and move on. I made a different purchase with my money than they would have, and that’s fine. I’d do it again. It was an unnecessary luxury, but no more than the nice dinner I had last night, and I’m still enjoying the font today.

Re: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#104

Post by wlonkly »

jorams wrote: post #66
dutchCourage wrote: post #46

It's the nicest monospace font I've seen in a while, and I'd love to try it out, but $75 is a rather hefty price for development use. I don't mean to diminish the work that's been done, but more... I wonder if you could sell twice as much by cutting the price in half. $75 prices out quite a lot of people.

For a paid font $75 for an unlimited lifetime license is not at all expensive. I suspect the difficulty isn't so much getting people to pay $75 for a font, but getting people to pay for a font in the first place. The font market is essentially split between free fonts and expensive fonts. The people willing to pay for fonts are not particularly price sensitive, because if they were they would just be using a free fon…

It's also that the market for "font customers" (for typesetting, design, etc.) and for developers who want a font in VSCode is very, very different.

What I'm seeing in this discussion is that the developer market is pretty price-sensitive, possibly because they're paying out of pocket and not charging back to clients or expensing.

Re: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#105

Post by kstrauser »

randunel wrote: post #100

There's a suspicious amount of comments posted at roughly the same time praising the font and claiming the price is worth it. These comments include "after a few trial days", which is unrealistic, because no sane person would go for "a few days" with swapped slashes and backslashes.

Lay off the paranoia. I’m one of the people who bought it because I like it, but I have zero to do with the author except as a normal customer. Get it or not, it’s no skin off my back. But I like to say nice things about stuff I enjoy, and this is one of them.

Re: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#106

Post by trealira »

tmtvl wrote: post #99

No CJK support? That's unfortunate, so far I've only found a single code font with CJK support (Code2000) and I'd really like a nicer one.

You could try Sarasa Gothic, which is made by the same person who made Iosevka.

Github Link: https://github.com/be5invis/Sarasa-Gothic

Specimen (made by someone else): https://picaq.github.io/sarasa/

There's also mplus 1 code:

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/M+PLUS+1+Code

https://mplusfonts.github.io/

Re: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#107

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

It's nice, but I don't want to be paying for my principal developer font, when there are dozens of free alternatives.

I am also hesitant about working (even free) third-party tools into my workflow. I have had the pleasure of dealing with these tools going belly-up (a couple just did, but they were important -not critical).

Re: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#108

Post by systemvoltage »

randunel wrote: post #100

There's a suspicious amount of comments posted at roughly the same time praising the font and claiming the price is worth it. These comments include "after a few trial days", which is unrealistic, because no sane person would go for "a few days" with swapped slashes and backslashes.

Strange accusation. I don’t see such comments that lived with the trial version.

Can you back up your astroturfing claim with explicit links to each comment that fits your description?

Because I found none.

Re: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#109

Post by inferiorhuman »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #107

It's nice, but I don't want to be paying for my principal developer font, when there are dozens of free alternatives. I am also hesitant about working (even free) third-party tools into my workflow. I have had the pleasure of dealing with these tools going belly-up (a couple just did, but they were important -not critical).

  I am also hesitant about working (even free) third-party tools into my workflow.
What?

Re: Berkeley Mono Typeface

#110

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #109
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #107

It's nice, but I don't want to be paying for my principal developer font, when there are dozens of free alternatives. I am also hesitant about working (even free) third-party tools into my workflow. I have had the pleasure of dealing with these tools going belly-up (a couple just did, but they were important -not critical).

I am also hesitant about working (even free) third-party tools into my workflow. What?

"Hesitant about" -not the same thing as "refuse to"

I use Xcode. Arguably, it's "free," if you ignore the fact that I run it on a $4,000 computer, but it is also the OS maker's tool of choice.

But each tool I add, each dependency in my workflow, is another rusty link in the chain.

I feel that we have gotten a bit too comfortable with adding ingredients to the stew.

A font isn't really that big a deal (unless you sell them). Things like documentation generators and linters, are more substantial (and I just had to remove both from my workflow, because they don't seem to have survived the shift to Xcode 15).

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