Retrocide Mono – A monospaced font with no decenders • Hacker News Board

Retrocide Mono – A monospaced font with no decenders

#1

Post by wildlogic » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 1:24 AM UTC

Retrocide Mono – A monospaced font with no decenders
geonot.github.io

Re: Retrocide Mono – A monospaced font with no decenders

#2

Post by wildlogic » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 1:25 AM UTC

Hey, this is my first font design, constructive criticism welcome! Thanks.

Re: Retrocide Mono – A monospaced font with no decenders

#3

Post by kurtis_reed » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 2:57 AM UTC

What's the benefit of no descenders?

Re: Retrocide Mono – A monospaced font with no decenders

#4

Post by lhmiles » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 4:56 AM UTC

Cool! I love it! To really show it off you could compare yours vs a regular one with line height = 0.9 or something

Re: Retrocide Mono – A monospaced font with no decenders

#5

Post by whiterook6 » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 6:44 AM UTC

wildlogic wrote: post #2

Hey, this is my first font design, constructive criticism welcome! Thanks.

It's very nice, but why? The lack of descenders makes it slightly harder to read. More of the letters look the same.

Re: Retrocide Mono – A monospaced font with no decenders

#6

Post by JSR_FDED » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 7:51 AM UTC

wildlogic wrote: post #2

Hey, this is my first font design, constructive criticism welcome! Thanks.

Love how legible this is. Exactly how my brain (trained on 8-bit micros) expects a font to look!

Re: Retrocide Mono – A monospaced font with no decenders

#7

Post by okayishdefaults » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 8:07 AM UTC

I'm unsure if "no descenders" provides increased clarity. For example, lowercase q is easy to recognize because your eyes are already drawn to it being one of few characters that descend. In the case of this font, you have a small uppercase Q as the lowercase q. This feels like it accomplishes the opposite of this stated benefit.

Re: Retrocide Mono – A monospaced font with no decenders

#8

Post by jiehong » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 8:19 AM UTC

Ancient Latin and Ancient Greek also did just that: lowercase didn’t exist yet.

Makes me want to try and write code in uppercase only (or not).

I like the theme of the website, though!

Re: Retrocide Mono – A monospaced font with no decenders

#9

Post by treetalker » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 9:24 AM UTC

The qu i ck brown f ox jumps over the lazy do 9

Re: Retrocide Mono – A monospaced font with no decenders

#10

Post by ricardobeat » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 1:32 PM UTC

treetalker wrote: post #9

The qu i ck brown f ox jumps over the lazy do 9

Letter spacing is not great for that 'i' indeed. Monospace fonts use a very wide serif at the bottom, or an extended arm to make the i appear equally-spaced, which this typeface seems to have ignored.