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MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

monolisa.dev

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Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#71

Post by rubyist5eva »

jrockway wrote: post #39
vinkelhake wrote: post #8

If you're willing to spend money on a font for coding, then do yourself a favor and take a look at PragmataPro as well. I bought a license (checks notes...) 8 years ago and it has served me very well. If I was not down to pay for a font, then I'd probably use one of Iosevka's forms. Personally, however, it became clear to me that just like my monitor, the font I spend hours looking at every day is also worth some mon…

Iosevka is my all-time favorite font. MonoLisa seems to sell itself on being "wide", and Iosevka is the opposite of that. Each letter is exactly .5em, which is on the very narrow side of things as monospaced fonts go. So if this thing appeals to you, Iosevka isn't the free alternative you're looking for. But if you want the nicest monospaced font in the world, then Iosevka is ;)

Iosevka also has an "extended" variant you can use, and you can create a custom build that has the width you want.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#72

Post by turtlebits »

StevePerkins wrote: post #52

I wonder how many people glancing at the landing page have browsed over to the download page, and discovered that this a paid font? To the tune of $69 to $239, depending on the options you want. If this were something really revolutionary, then okay. But this looks like every other Bitstream Vera Sans Mono variant, just tweaked to be a touch wider than Fira Code or Jetbrains Mono. But half of the fonts on https://www…

IMO, this is one of the rare programming fonts that actually looks great to me. I use Operator which is also a paid font. I used Source Code Pro for a short while and never really like any of the other free offerings.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#73

Post by drewzero1 »

moffkalast wrote: post #54
StevePerkins wrote: post #52

I wonder how many people glancing at the landing page have browsed over to the download page, and discovered that this a paid font? To the tune of $69 to $239, depending on the options you want. If this were something really revolutionary, then okay. But this looks like every other Bitstream Vera Sans Mono variant, just tweaked to be a touch wider than Fira Code or Jetbrains Mono. But half of the fonts on https://www…

People charging $199 for a slightly wider Lucida Console, you can't make this shit up. The marketing is so outrageous. In case someone's seriously considering this, here are an additional two sites that have literally hundreds of CC0 and other free to use fonts, not just monospace: https://www.1001freefonts.com http://allfont.net DIN 1451 Mittelschrift is my personal favorite.

I love the DIN family but haven't been able to find a monospaced variant for coding/terminal use. I'd add Abstract Fonts[1] to the list, though you have to watch the license (many are only free for personal/non-commercial use).

[1] https://www.abstractfonts.com/

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#74

Post by divbzero »

Is this part about terminals actually true? Or a tad exaggerated for marketing?

> MonoLisa uses open forms and terminals (starting and ending points) that are pointing towards the neighboring letters to let the eye follow the line of text fluently.

Regardless, I like the font overall. My go-to is Fira Code but this might be worth a try.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#75

Post by speedgoose »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #17
speedgoose wrote: post #15

Since we are talking about our favourite coding fonts, my personal choice is on Comic Code. I find it very easy to read and better than the other mono comic sans fonts. https://tosche.net/fonts/comic-code

Oh god... I can't say if you're trolling or not.

I’m really using this font everyday since about two years. I remember setting the font in vscode and testing comic sans ms for fun, just to see. To my surprise it wasn’t that bad for me but of course not monospaced. So I looked at monospaced fonts inspired by comic sans ms, you have a few free ones on GitHub, and I ended up with comic code relatively quick.

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#76

Post by thor_molecules »

moffkalast wrote: post #54
StevePerkins wrote: post #52

I wonder how many people glancing at the landing page have browsed over to the download page, and discovered that this a paid font? To the tune of $69 to $239, depending on the options you want. If this were something really revolutionary, then okay. But this looks like every other Bitstream Vera Sans Mono variant, just tweaked to be a touch wider than Fira Code or Jetbrains Mono. But half of the fonts on https://www…

People charging $199 for a slightly wider Lucida Console, you can't make this shit up. The marketing is so outrageous. In case someone's seriously considering this, here are an additional two sites that have literally hundreds of CC0 and other free to use fonts, not just monospace: https://www.1001freefonts.com http://allfont.net DIN 1451 Mittelschrift is my personal favorite.

If you like symbols and fancy terminal stuff, I'd also like to recommend any of the Nerd Fonts - all free.

https://www.nerdfonts.com/

Re: MonoLisa – A font designed for developers

#78

Post by andjd »

I'm going to hop on my hobby horse again for a second:

One of their first points is this:

>Designing a monospace font is much harder than a traditional, proportional one: being constrained by the same width of all glyphs can result in a boring or unreadable font.

And they're absolutely right. But it begs the first-principals question-- why code using a monospace font? Today, every major editor that isn't terminal-based supports proportional width fonts beautifully. It's also incredibly rare to see modern style guides that depend on having consistent column widths. In 2022, there's no technical reason to code using monospaced fonts. And there are a ton of beautiful and readable fonts out there -- There are probably a dozen pre-installed on your system that are more beautiful and readable than this font.

You see this tag line time-and-time again. "A font designed by and for software developers." But font design is and art and a discipline. Doing it well is very hard.

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