Something I never liked about this game is its showing it in your browser at your chosen font size.
Chrome (assuming you're using Chrome) draws it a specific way. This does not match how Freetype (using typical tuning) or DirectWrite draws it. Chrome's choices in font renderer tuning and blending makes it kind of split the difference between Windows-style and OSX-style, and isn't native to either.
What it should be doing is showing you lossless screenshots of actual in-app renders at different sizes. Some in Chrome (to represent the Electron apps), some in DirectWrite, some in OSX post-Retina, etc.
Some fonts look amazing at larger sizes, but are unreadable at smaller ones. Some perform exceptionally well at smaller sizes. Some look great on every font renderer but OSX's, but some only look right on OSX and look bad everywhere else.
I've sorta played this game with myself, in a semi-objective way: take a bunch of fonts, ignore the subjective art nature of them, and throw them at a bunch of common renderers and see what the optimal size is, and then sort by smallest legible size.
If we define Fira Code, the most popular code font out there, as the bare minimum, 8 of the ones I tested beat it, while 17 were worse.
Totally agree, the same fonts at the same pixel sizes often look massively different in different environments. I -love- macOS’ native font rendering, but have been unsuccessfull in emulating it on Linux :/
Freetype can render almost indistinguishably from OSX post-Retina.
Set `FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="cff:no-stem-darkening=0 autofitter:no-stem-darkening=0"`, and then also enable (S)light hinting on LoDPI, or None on HiDPI. Also, disable subpixel and use greyscale only.
OSX looks the way it does because they use excessive stem darkening combined with incorrect gamma blending. GDI, WPF/UWP/WinUI, most ClearType/DirectWrite consumers, GTK, and most browsers also do incorrect gamma blending as well.
Qt is the exception. It enables stem darkening by default, but then uses correct gamma blending. Unfortunately, this is the objectively correct way of rendering, everyone else is doing it wrong.
The only thing you can't do is OSX gamma blends incorrectly for 1.8 on a 2.2-2.4 screen. Everyone else blends incorrectly for sRGB/2.2 on a 2.2-2.4 screen. Light on dark's obscene behavior on OSX shouldn't be replicated.
If you want the opposite, and make it look like Windows, force stem darkening off (use the above env, but set both to 1), and set hinting to Full to make it look like pre-Cleartype, or Medium to make it look like DirectWrite.
Going through this, I was introduced to <= being converted to a ligature which immediately ruled it as a nope for me. No monkey business with the characters of my code thank you very much.
I tend to bounce around between Ubuntu Mono, Fira Code and Comic Mono. Comic Mono is not amongst the participants in this game, and my finalists were Ubuntu Mono and Fira Code, so I guess I'm pretty pleased that I've stayed consistent as well!
> That is usually configurable at the terminal level
And if you use Emacs, it's configurable at the buffer level. [1] This lets me build a version of Iosevka where `~=` and `!=` both become ligaturized but in different major modes, avoiding any confusion.
I'm not either. I think it may look "cool" visually but when trying to work with code with those in it, it seems odd, like that it's a single character even though it's not and it just breaks the flow
Because most of those who commented are among those who do not like ligatures, I must present a counterpoint, to diminish the statistical bias.
Some people like ligatures, some people do not like them, but this does not matter, because any decent text editor or terminal emulator has a setting to enable or disable ligatures.
Any good programming font must have ligatures, which will keep happy both kinds of users, those who like and those who dislike ligatures.
I strongly hate the straitjacket forced by ASCII upon programming languages, which is the root cause of most ambiguous grammars that complicate the parsing of programming languages and increase the probability of bugs, and which has also forced the replacement of traditional mathematical symbols with less appropriate characters.
Using Unicode for source programs is the best solution, but when having to use legacy programming languages in a professional setting, where the use of a custom preprocessor would be frowned upon, using fonts with ligatures is still an improvement over ASCII.
A coding font is supposed to help you distinguish between characters, not confuse them for each other. Also, ASCII ligatures usually look worse than the proper Unicode character they are supposed to emulate. The often indecisive form they take (glyphs rearranged to resemble a different character, but still composed of original glyph shapes; weird proportions and spacing due to the font maintaining the column width of the separate ASCII code points) creates a strong uncanny valley effect. I wouldn't mind having "≤", "≠" or "⇒" tokens in my source code, but half-measures just don't cut it.
No need to rely on app-specific configs. You can disable it globally in your fontconfig. For example, this disables ligatures in the Cascadia Code font:
I am like a fan of these ligature, and have been using fira code for a long time now. When i am writing equations on my own, this is how i would write, so it helps a lot. Without ligature these days i find it bit difficult to read these, <=, ==, => .
I write a lot of R and I love fonts that convert <- and |> into a single character. It's definitely a preference, but it matches how my brain thinks about the code.
I love ligatures but I wish there was tooling for context sensitive ones. This is a really good example. When developing, I love <= turning into ≤. When running a cli that happens to use <= for the start of its progress bar… not so much
You are in luck! Editors do support customizing which ligatures get used where. For example, ligature.el lets me set only certain ligatures in certain modes. I like ligatures in Haskell, but dislike them in prose. I don't really customize at a finer-grained level than modes, but I could. Other editors should have similar configs.
Knowing that everything in here is people asking why their font is missing:
I highly recommend having a look at
[ MAPLE MONO ]
(on Github https://github.com/subframe7536/Maple-font).
It has amazing readability, looks nice, is compatible with NF if you use that.
I received compliments from people looking over my shoulder for my f'ing font?!
Huge shoutout to subframe7536 ^^
The slant and connective distance of the cursive italic l are noticeably different than of the other letters, so every word that includes one is very jarring.
It looks like they naively aligned the slant of the leftmost edge at the mid-height of the glyph, which is not the right way to optically align shapes, especially for a symbol with asymmetric curvature (the leading face of the loop leans substantially more than the trailing face). And then in addition to that, a too-wide arrangement when adjoining ("ul", "ll", etc) causes excess dead space around adjoined pairs.
You see this quite strongly in the "null" that appears on line 5 in their example screenshot. The two "l"s both appear to lean more than the "nu", and the "ul" has more internal space than the "nu", and the "ll" has even more than that.
I've been a long time Fira Code user, but recently switched to Maple - I love it. Mostly because of the "single storey" `a`, but that's just a personal preference of mine.
Fira Code does have a "single storey" a. You can activate it by passing the "cv01" feature flag to your text editor of choice. (If the text editor supports otf font features)
Thanks for the tip! I really need to look into these feature flags some more to understand how they work. I noticed that the Inter font has similar flags too.
What do you like about it? I like that the I and l are distinctive, and of course the distinction between 0 and O. However, there are some nice letter differentiators that it is missing, such as a shorter middle cane in the letter "m" (Ubuntu Mono has this for example).
That dollar sign is awful. I kinda dig some parts of this, but my brain simply doesn't parse that as a dollar sign; it requires extra thought to recognize it.
Berkeley Mono, Iosevka, and Cascadia Code are missing which are my favorite fonts. The game handed me Roboto Mono instead.
What I noticed while playing was that when fonts are similar, I really pay attention to the rendering of "m" and "r". When they look off, the whole font looks off to me.
It's really funny that after going through all those fonts it landed on Ubuntu Mono for me which is what I use anyways to code in my terminal.
I wonder if it's Stockholm syndrome or if I really do prefer it. It's a totally fine font, I've never felt the need to change it. All the default open source mono fonts seem completely adequate I suppose.
I love this, but I really wish it were structured as a "Hot or Not" type of round robin system rather than a bracket.
Some fonts are close enough that I don't know if I'd choose one over the other consistently, and I'd be curious to see a percentage score of how much I like a particular font.
Totally agreed -- there are so many different factors involved in each comparison, and I feel like I'm easily paying attention to different things on each comparison.
Unfortunately, I don't believe there's any established algorithm for how to repeatedly sample pairwise preferences to convert them into a strict ranking, which would ideally be with an active learning component to really drill down into the comparisons that are the closest. Would be a fascinating thing to try to develop, though.
Cream is a very distinctive font. It’s perfect for Smalltalk. In the 1980s I remade it for the Apple II to be used in a game. Obviously very little text would fit on the screen it was used for.
I was intrigued by a font called Codemonkey. This site has lots of classic comic fonts, including WildWords which is used in pretty much every manga translation.
Yeah, a few years ago I tried the free ones, but eventually settled on Comic Code. I've been using it ever since - it's pleasant to code with. (If anyone is considering this - the "essentials" set with bold/italic is around $30. You don't need the full set.)
similar situation here, but i used it because i thought it was funny... then kept it because it grew on me haha. had it for a few years, might give it a spin again
Nowadays I use a lot of Iosevka. Previously I was on Ubuntu and JetBrains Mono, both are great fonts. A bit of PT Mono as well, even Terminus for a bit. One of my favorites has got to be Liberation Mono though - the most readable font I’ve ever found, even if Iosevka lets me put more stuff on screen horizontally. Oh also I’ve started enjoying Cascadia Code recently, surprisingly pleasant.
Yeah I was disappointed that Cascadia was not in the fonts on the site. What won me over for Cascadia was: I decided to try it for a couple weeks. By the end, I was certain that Cascadia must be larger than my previous font because it was so much easier to read, so I opened two terminals side-by-side and counted the rows+columns that fit between my old font and Cascadia. To my complete shock, Cascadia fit a couple more lines on my screen, indicating that it was actually _smaller_ despite being easier to read.
I clicked this link with the thought "I'm curious, but I don't think I really have strong opinions about fonts", and was almost immediately proven wrong with the revulsion I felt at Xanh Mono.
Though it turns out that VS Code default (Droid Sans Mono) is (to my eye) basically identical to my winner (Roboto Mono), so the exercise was mostly academic.
I had the same but I am thinking of updating to see if I can optimize my terminal a bit. Roboto has font weights, and probably has a better emoji pack, although that's just a guess -- maybe google doesn't tack on emojis by default.
For me it's Berkeley Mono...I was unable to find anything that comes close to it. But this games is fun and the result is a font that is similar to my favourite
I have been on JetBrains Mono ever since it's release. I am getting FOMO from not using Berkely Mono, because it totally looks like something that would sit right with me.
As I get older I prefer the text on my screen to be bigger than usual. Most websites tend to have super small fonts for some reason.
For coding I much prefer fonts that are bold and easier to read. Who actually likes these whimsical cursive looking comments or super thin looking fonts?
Not entirely. The font "size" is the height of each character, not the width they take up or the stroke thickness. So some fonts will have narrow characters & display more characters horizontally than fonts with wider characters.
Wow JetBrains Mono to me is the furthest thing possible from Iosevka. I use PragmataPro (which Iosevka is extremely similar to) and I hate JetBrains Mono for feeling so large compared to the compact characters I'm used to.
I didn't necessarily select the one closest to what I currently use in the game, but more looking at the shapes of different characters to see what looked the "nicest".
Cool, obviously a lot of people are going to quibble about the default lineup (wheres Iosevka?) but for anyone who hasn't nailed down a preference it seems great!
Ended up with Victor Mono and indeed, I used that font for years before switching to Iosevka.
The game certainly needs a progress bar (I tried on iPhone) and option “there’s no chance in world that I will ever use any of proposed options”.
Funny enough I realized that every several years I oscillate between trying to get readable narrow fonts (that brought me to Iosevka) and wide ones (Azeret Mono, anyone?)
Victor Mono made it fairly late in my rounds, but the "@" character looked terrible as rendered in firefox. It looks a bit better in my terminal, which points out to a downside of this that others have observed.
I stopped looking for fonts after I got comfortable tweaking the metric settings of Iosevka. My current setup exports a set of really compressed cuts (more compressed than Pragmata Pro) which I've always found hard to come by.
Surprised that I picked Oxygen Mono over Noto, but probably because I wasn't aware of Oxygen.
Would be nice to be able to play it with my own fonts because some got eliminated purely because 0 (zero) looked like O (letter). Fira Code was a winner only because there weren't paid fonts that I use.
Nice work! I wish rankings were done with an Elo score. I was worried of regretting my choices sometimes (single elimination?). Would require a lot more comparisons to arrive at stable scores, but the interface is nice I wouldn't mind.
Been running Berkeley Mono for years. Before that i flipped fonts and theme like every week. I sometimes wish you could not change font or color theme at all.
I can sympathize; I shudder to think of how many total hours of my life I've spent tweaking fonts in my text editors.
That said, these days I almost exclusively use Input Mono [0], specifically the "Narrow" variety. With an occasional sprinkling of either Iosevka Fixed or PragmataPro Mono.
One nit about the site: the screen elements forced me to make my browser window more than half the size of my screen, and I use a 3840×2160 monitor. My windows are normally about ⅕ the size of the screen and roughly 4:3 ratio shaped. It was nearly unusable like that (I don't suffer issues from almost any other site.)
On the game/bracket: it narrowed me down to Noto Sans Mono and I'm honestly not surprised, it's one of the few fonts that comes with my operating system that I find acceptable.
That being said, what I actually have my terminal and Emacs set to is “AcPlus IBM VGA 8x16” from https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/. I've always been fond of the VGA font and it tickles all the right usability marks for me.
I landed on Inconsolata, which makes sense as it's directly inspired by Consolas. I already use Inconsolata most places, since I'm not usually on Windows.
My favourite* bit about this thread is the number of times I've gone "ooh, that looks like a nice font", downloaded it, unzipped it, and loaded into Fontbook which has promptly gone "you already have this one DUMBASS".
Well, I appear to be the only person that likes Nanum Gothic Coding. (Though I typically use Input Mono - not present in this site's set of fonts.)
The semifinals for me with ligatures enabled were Inconsolata vs Cousine, and Nanum Gothic Coding vs Xanh Mono. With ligatures disabled: Xanh Mono vs Nanum Gothic Coding, and Share Tech Mono vs Roboto Mono.
It'd be nice if you could click the various fonts in play at the end, to see them again and compare them against one another. (Regarding comparing images against one another: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46954055) I had specific metrics that I was going for, but sometimes it was marginal.
I got PT Mono in the game, but this gave me the kick I needed to remember about ProggyClean[1] and track it down. Used to love it many years ago, time to give it another spin and see if it holds its own.
Terminus TTF[1] is my favorite monospace font. The key thing for me is that it is actually a bitmap font, which means it is sharp and crisp. I get headaches from most types of anti-aliasing on traditional low DPI monitors. The colour bleed from subpixel AA is awful, but even most grey scale AA (except when using full hinting as well) is just so blurry.
Unfortunately they seem to have missed it on this page.
A few years ago I found comic mono and monofur for Powerline. I switch between the 2 when I get bored of one or the other. I decided I won't try any new fonts, it's a waste of time for me and I hate having too many options to choose from, not only fonts but basically everything else too, it's distracting. Same for my editor's theme, I switch between Braver's Solarized Light and Radical.
This way I can focus on coding and less on tweaking my environment.
> This way I can focus on coding and less on tweaking my environment.
I made myself my own pixel-perfect perfect font, more than 10 years ago. I simply copy it from one system to the next one when I upgrade (either the machine or the OS).
It's basically a modified pixel-perfect Terminus font, but with some elements mixed from an old pixel-perfect Monaco font and some modification of mine.
Something I cannot live without is a tall pipe symbol. And my pipe symbol must have a hole in it in the middle (and it cannot be mistaken for an exclamation mark).
I've got the following as a quick test. The reason for a,b,c,e is to verify that <>,{},[], etc. all perfectly align vertically.
Everything is correct, to the pixel.
I don't believe in anti-aliasing for a coding font, not even on a retina display, and I love my 3840x1600 pixels 38" monitor and it's pixel size is perfect to me.
RA $|-sSTtf the little fortran
gqy z2Z s5S 8B CG6 DO uv ;; these should look different (8 / B is difficult to get right)
a!?aA! [a]
b!?b {b}
c?!d (c)
c?c <e>
c!c
if ( a && b || c & d) { [0x88, 0x42, 0xFA, 0xdeadcafebabe]; }
*if ( a && b || c & d) { [0x88, 0x42, 0xFA, 0xdeadcafebabe]; }*
;; found somewhere
lnt foob1x -= {(0)} "'foo'bar";
int foOblx == ((0)) 'foo`bar`' `"':
|nt f0obIx += {{o}} '"O08! LIl1i!!| 7?
the lowercase 's' has a shorter upper bar and the lowercase 'l' is stylised.
The thing is: I obsessed for days, creating my own pixel-perfect font. And I don't need to tweak it anymore: it's perfect (to me, YMMV) and I use it ever since.
Can't share it as I reused both Terminus and chars from Monaco.
FWIW I had more than 10/10 eyesight (once you get at 10, there are additional tests) and in my entire life I've never seen one person beat me at the "read sign on the highway". Pixel-perfect font, no AA, custom made font for me. YMMV. Haters gonna hate.
I'm probably your twin, separated at birth... may you share your bitmap font?
> I don't believe in anti-aliasing for a coding font, not even on a retina display
This is a very good point. As resolution increases, antialiased fonts become less ugly, but also less necessary. Thus at no resolution they make any sense; but they look ridiculous for different reasons.
Lately I've taken to Iosevka, the 'curly' variant to be precise. Even though I hated it when I first tried it, I revisited it because I was noticing that, with coding agents running in the same window, I wanted to be able to see more at a glance. With Iosevka's semi-width glyphs you can just fit a lot more in the same space. Took a day or two to get used to its slender appearance. Now every other font feels unnecessarily w i d e
The font I use, IBM Plex Mono, I chose not because I love the font, but because it's the one I love most of the fonts with CJK variants (which basically means IBM Plex, Google Noto, or Adobe Source). It's unfortunate because I really like Libertinus (a rare serif monospace font), but trying to match different non-CJK and CJK fonts that work well together is annoying.
That's very nice and I ended up with the same font I tend to use (Source Code Pro) vs the font I used before (Noto Sans Mono). Some features I'd love to see:
- An ELO-based version with many more variables, so that I can open the site from time to time and find more nice fonts
Dunno how long this is normally supposed to go but it took me 10+ min of actually seriously considering the fonts at each choice and the final suggestion is a font that I actively dislike. I’m curious how it’s narrowing things down because I noticed that it started to give me only serif fonts which I don’t like. But the sans serif ones that it was using to try and narrow things down had distinct characteristics that I didn’t like like very narrow stems or very narrow or wide characters. But it wasn’t doing that with serif fonts. I’m guessing it began to think I preferred serifs because of that but in reality, I wasn’t picking the lesser of two evils most of the time.
It's just a tournament, the winner goes to next round. Play it fast, all the way to the end and you'll see how it works. It's some 16 or 32 rounds all the way.
Ended up with Hack, but it is missing the font I use[1]. I think I could live with hack.
It's amazing to me how many of the fonts in this bracket have lower-case ell and one as nearly identical (both with a line at the base and some protrusion to the left at the top).
On improvement would be to allow scalling different fonts to different sizes. With them all at (e.g.) 16pt, there is a wildly different amount of text on the screen.
I wish the sample text included _underscores_, since I have occasionally found that they disappear with certain combinations of font + size + renderer.
And a run of all the numeric digits 0123456789, to show how their heights align.
And [square brackets], to show how easily they are distinguished from certain other glyphs.
And the vertical | bar, for the same reason.
...
Adobe Source Code Pro and Ubuntu Mono were my finalists. I think my preference would come down to window and font size, since Ubuntu Mono seemed to be narrower and leave more space between lines.
(Also, I kind of rushed the first few comparisons, so it's possible that I prematurely eliminated a typeface that I would have liked more.)
But in general, I think obsessing over the monospace font you use for coding is, ultimately, bike shedding. I've used a lot of different fonts over the year, not because I was trying to find the best one, but because I used the default font of whatever tool I was using at the time, and - guess what - I was fine with it every time.
Obligatory shout-out to Berkeley Mono [1], which understandably isn't on this site because it's a paid font. I really enjoy the customizer that comes with it, I use the font on all my terminal/IDE environments, as well as on my blog.
(FWIW, I just did the codingfont bracket and got Source Code Pro, which I've used in the past, along with Iosevka and Commit Mono)
Last time I took this I ended up with the exact font I already use, and I realized that it was because I was basically picking whichever font was closer to it on each choice. Because I also enforce my fonts of choice on my browser, I guess it's just the only font I've read code in for so many years that it's just "what code should look like" to me.
Doesn't it kind of default the purpose if you can't see it in the actual environment you'd be using it? I know the differences are very minor between terminals and browsers when it comes to font rendering, but this seems like a tool that should be a plugin with the editor people are intending to use the font with, rather than a website.
Typo : Webiste URL
The site is unusable on mobile even with desktop mode
In desktop mode the instructions to use the arrows appeared only after I zoomed out, they would gain from being part of the top banner
Would be nice to have the final listing :
1st place, second place, joined third
As expected, I landed on my current and favourite font, Inconsolata.
I remember seeing another font that I liked but I didn't manage to check what font it was before the game showed the winner. Looks like I have to play it again. Not on mobile at least, the webpage was hard to interact on Android Chrome.
Suggestion: I'd like to have an option to exclude fonts without ligatures from the game. And it seems there are others who don't like ligatures who would probably like to be able to exclude fonts with ligatures. You could also do this for other features like serifs.
I like, as it is quick to decide, and you can see font names afterwards (some indeed looked similar).
At the same time, it would be wonderful if window sizes were more consistent (now things are obstructed, with scrolling, etc). And I would love to download the ranking graph!
I discovered I do not like a foot on my l's. Ubuntu mono won. But it also didn't have any of the fonts from VSCode I'm on now which are very similar (Menlo, Monaco, 'Courier New', monospace).
I tried this variant of JetBrains Mono and it had the perfect glyph width (reportedly -6%) for my screen and window sizes: NRK Mono Condensed from https://github.com/N-R-K/NRK-Mono. I also agree with almost all of the other modifications mentioned in the github page under “Some notable changes are:”
Now I can have side-by-side two editors plus a Structure or Project pane at the left in PyCharm while having 120 chars visible in both editors.
Not bad. I picked First code which is acceptable. My fav though is 0xProto, which has ligatures that still maintain separation between the symbols and is otherwise a very nice, legible font.
Played it twice to see if it's reproducible. First time, Fira Code; second time Source Code Pro. Source Code Pro came in second first time round as well. Been using Fira Code until now.
This kind of breaks for me because I identify all the familiar fonts quite quickly—Consolas, Inconsolata, Iosevka, JetBrains Mono, Fira Mono/Code, Menlo, SF Mono, Courier...
Neat educational game. Would have liked to see Maple Mono in the line up, but I'm sure you've gotta draw the line somewhere or the game would be too tedious.
I ended up with Roboto Mono, a font I used to use before I switched from Linux to Mac for my daily drivers. I'm not the kind of person who can identify a font by name simply by looking at it, so I was pleasantly surprised! I chose it more or less at random back in 2012.
Same. Came down to Fira Code and PT Mono. I already use Fira Code, so I probably biased to what I'm used to. I do think that Fira Code is hard to beat when it comes to ambiguous characters.
- *: in the middle (better for things like multiplication), or high (better for things like C pointers)
- Alignment of =, >, - some fonts align -, = and > to that "=>" and "->" look good, others will not, making it arguably look better in isolation, others will optimize for ligatures
- The "i" may look significantly different, some will prioritize consistency, others will prioritize making il1I look distinct. Same idea for 0/O
- Aspect ratio, do you want a wide font, making alignment, indentation, and special characters clearer, or a narrow font, allowing you to cram longer lines into a single screen.
These are compromises, and depending on your style and language, you may prefer one or the other.
interesting... for me JetBrains Mono won, which is the one I already use. But I discovered Atkinson Hyperlegible, which looks awesome for reading books. I guess I have a minor reading issue that I wasn't aware of!
brackets aren’t really the best way to figure this out, is it? makes a lot of assumptions about human preferences that probably don’t actually hold. something like ELO might be better.
It is sort of baffling that people make some of these hideous fonts, look at them, and decide to publish them regardless. A font where the lowercase i and l are indistinguishable? Okay...
The one use case I've seen for Dank Mono was presentations with an overhead projector at conferences. The cursive for italics can make some of the structure of the code more differentiated when viewing it at a distance.
I've been jumping between Maple Mono and a custom Iosevka build that I've been tweaking here and there for the better part of 3 years. Jetbrains Mono is also really nice if you want something a bit more neutral.
Chrome (assuming you're using Chrome) draws it a specific way. This does not match how Freetype (using typical tuning) or DirectWrite draws it. Chrome's choices in font renderer tuning and blending makes it kind of split the difference between Windows-style and OSX-style, and isn't native to either.
What it should be doing is showing you lossless screenshots of actual in-app renders at different sizes. Some in Chrome (to represent the Electron apps), some in DirectWrite, some in OSX post-Retina, etc.
Some fonts look amazing at larger sizes, but are unreadable at smaller ones. Some perform exceptionally well at smaller sizes. Some look great on every font renderer but OSX's, but some only look right on OSX and look bad everywhere else.
I've sorta played this game with myself, in a semi-objective way: take a bunch of fonts, ignore the subjective art nature of them, and throw them at a bunch of common renderers and see what the optimal size is, and then sort by smallest legible size.
If we define Fira Code, the most popular code font out there, as the bare minimum, 8 of the ones I tested beat it, while 17 were worse.
https://github.com/Diablo-D3/dotfiles/blob/master/fontsizes....
Set `FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="cff:no-stem-darkening=0 autofitter:no-stem-darkening=0"`, and then also enable (S)light hinting on LoDPI, or None on HiDPI. Also, disable subpixel and use greyscale only.
OSX looks the way it does because they use excessive stem darkening combined with incorrect gamma blending. GDI, WPF/UWP/WinUI, most ClearType/DirectWrite consumers, GTK, and most browsers also do incorrect gamma blending as well.
Qt is the exception. It enables stem darkening by default, but then uses correct gamma blending. Unfortunately, this is the objectively correct way of rendering, everyone else is doing it wrong.
The only thing you can't do is OSX gamma blends incorrectly for 1.8 on a 2.2-2.4 screen. Everyone else blends incorrectly for sRGB/2.2 on a 2.2-2.4 screen. Light on dark's obscene behavior on OSX shouldn't be replicated.
If you want the opposite, and make it look like Windows, force stem darkening off (use the above env, but set both to 1), and set hinting to Full to make it look like pre-Cleartype, or Medium to make it look like DirectWrite.
Interestingly, Ubuntu Mono was the font I landed on - which is already the font that I use. At least I'm consistent.
And if you use Emacs, it's configurable at the buffer level. [1] This lets me build a version of Iosevka where `~=` and `!=` both become ligaturized but in different major modes, avoiding any confusion.
[1]: https://github.com/mickeynp/ligature.el
Some people like ligatures, some people do not like them, but this does not matter, because any decent text editor or terminal emulator has a setting to enable or disable ligatures.
Any good programming font must have ligatures, which will keep happy both kinds of users, those who like and those who dislike ligatures.
I strongly hate the straitjacket forced by ASCII upon programming languages, which is the root cause of most ambiguous grammars that complicate the parsing of programming languages and increase the probability of bugs, and which has also forced the replacement of traditional mathematical symbols with less appropriate characters.
Using Unicode for source programs is the best solution, but when having to use legacy programming languages in a professional setting, where the use of a custom preprocessor would be frowned upon, using fonts with ligatures is still an improvement over ASCII.
[ MAPLE MONO ]
(on Github https://github.com/subframe7536/Maple-font). It has amazing readability, looks nice, is compatible with NF if you use that. I received compliments from people looking over my shoulder for my f'ing font?! Huge shoutout to subframe7536 ^^
This seems bizarre to me, I do not understand the rationale behind it. Can someone enlighten me?
(the term you were looking for is "oblique", btw)
[0] https://font.nina.coffee/
It looks like they naively aligned the slant of the leftmost edge at the mid-height of the glyph, which is not the right way to optically align shapes, especially for a symbol with asymmetric curvature (the leading face of the loop leans substantially more than the trailing face). And then in addition to that, a too-wide arrangement when adjoining ("ul", "ll", etc) causes excess dead space around adjoined pairs.
You see this quite strongly in the "null" that appears on line 5 in their example screenshot. The two "l"s both appear to lean more than the "nu", and the "ul" has more internal space than the "nu", and the "ll" has even more than that.
For more info: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/wiki/How-to-enable-stylis...
< Look at the tasteful colouring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God.
What I noticed while playing was that when fonts are similar, I really pay attention to the rendering of "m" and "r". When they look off, the whole font looks off to me.
It's so good. Perfect even. And they have a really neat customization tool.
I've been using it for a few years now and they actually still occasionally release a new version of it. Haven't gotten tired of it yet.
The only complaint I have about it is that I had to do a hacky workaround to get my Nix setups to pull it in since it's proprietary.
I even forked their "Machine Report" tool (which presumes Debian) to make it work on Linux/NixOS by applying a "polyfill": https://github.com/pmarreck/usgc-machine-report-nixos-editio...
I wonder if it's Stockholm syndrome or if I really do prefer it. It's a totally fine font, I've never felt the need to change it. All the default open source mono fonts seem completely adequate I suppose.
Some fonts are close enough that I don't know if I'd choose one over the other consistently, and I'd be curious to see a percentage score of how much I like a particular font.
Unfortunately, I don't believe there's any established algorithm for how to repeatedly sample pairwise preferences to convert them into a strict ranking, which would ideally be with an active learning component to really drill down into the comparisons that are the closest. Would be a fascinating thing to try to develop, though.
https://www.comicbookfonts.com/Code-Monkey-Variable-font-p/b...
Unfortunately plus signs display as blank spaces in the test drive. Oh well.
It would be nice if it showed you 1st, 2nd, semi-finalist, quarter-finalist...
It would also be nice to see progress of some kind, a few minutes in I was wondering if I was near completion or just getting started.
It's hidden behind the menu button on mobile.
Though it turns out that VS Code default (Droid Sans Mono) is (to my eye) basically identical to my winner (Roboto Mono), so the exercise was mostly academic.
I came from Fira Code to JetBrains Mono to MonoLisa (several years each) then finally settled on Berkeley Mono and refuse to use anything else!
For coding I much prefer fonts that are bold and easier to read. Who actually likes these whimsical cursive looking comments or super thin looking fonts?
I ended up with "Roboto Mono" btw.
Also, black backgrounds require bolder fonts.
Playing the game gave me Jetbrains Mono though.
I didn't necessarily select the one closest to what I currently use in the game, but more looking at the shapes of different characters to see what looked the "nicest".
https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/tree/master/patched-...
The game certainly needs a progress bar (I tried on iPhone) and option “there’s no chance in world that I will ever use any of proposed options”.
Funny enough I realized that every several years I oscillate between trying to get readable narrow fonts (that brought me to Iosevka) and wide ones (Azeret Mono, anyone?)
https://pastebin.com/d3RzBR6B
Would be nice to be able to play it with my own fonts because some got eliminated purely because 0 (zero) looked like O (letter). Fira Code was a winner only because there weren't paid fonts that I use.
That said, these days I almost exclusively use Input Mono [0], specifically the "Narrow" variety. With an occasional sprinkling of either Iosevka Fixed or PragmataPro Mono.
0: https://input.djr.com/
https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace/blob/main/docs/Textu...
* no <= or === ligatures (i still like to see the separate characters)
* 'i' vs 'l' vs '1' (I now mostly prefer fonts where the lowercase 'l' has the righthand bend on the bottom)
* dotted zero vs slashed zero (i prefer the slashed zero, but dotted is fine as well)
The most shocking revelation that I took from this game is how many coding fonts think it's acceptable to neither slash nor dot their zeroes.
I can't imagine using one of those fonts that leaves 0 and O nearly indistinguishable.
On the game/bracket: it narrowed me down to Noto Sans Mono and I'm honestly not surprised, it's one of the few fonts that comes with my operating system that I find acceptable.
That being said, what I actually have my terminal and Emacs set to is “AcPlus IBM VGA 8x16” from https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/. I've always been fond of the VGA font and it tickles all the right usability marks for me.
Don't get old, kids, it sucks.
The semifinals for me with ligatures enabled were Inconsolata vs Cousine, and Nanum Gothic Coding vs Xanh Mono. With ligatures disabled: Xanh Mono vs Nanum Gothic Coding, and Share Tech Mono vs Roboto Mono.
It'd be nice if you could click the various fonts in play at the end, to see them again and compare them against one another. (Regarding comparing images against one another: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46954055) I had specific metrics that I was going for, but sometimes it was marginal.
There's a vector version[2] now too!
[1]: http://proggyfonts.net/
[2]: https://github.com/bluescan/proggyfonts/tree/master/ProggyVe...
Unfortunately they seem to have missed it on this page.
[1]: https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/
This way I can focus on coding and less on tweaking my environment.
I made myself my own pixel-perfect perfect font, more than 10 years ago. I simply copy it from one system to the next one when I upgrade (either the machine or the OS).
It's basically a modified pixel-perfect Terminus font, but with some elements mixed from an old pixel-perfect Monaco font and some modification of mine.
Something I cannot live without is a tall pipe symbol. And my pipe symbol must have a hole in it in the middle (and it cannot be mistaken for an exclamation mark).
I've got the following as a quick test. The reason for a,b,c,e is to verify that <>,{},[], etc. all perfectly align vertically.
Everything is correct, to the pixel.
I don't believe in anti-aliasing for a coding font, not even on a retina display, and I love my 3840x1600 pixels 38" monitor and it's pixel size is perfect to me.
the lowercase 's' has a shorter upper bar and the lowercase 'l' is stylised.The thing is: I obsessed for days, creating my own pixel-perfect font. And I don't need to tweak it anymore: it's perfect (to me, YMMV) and I use it ever since.
Can't share it as I reused both Terminus and chars from Monaco.
FWIW I had more than 10/10 eyesight (once you get at 10, there are additional tests) and in my entire life I've never seen one person beat me at the "read sign on the highway". Pixel-perfect font, no AA, custom made font for me. YMMV. Haters gonna hate.
> I don't believe in anti-aliasing for a coding font, not even on a retina display
This is a very good point. As resolution increases, antialiased fonts become less ugly, but also less necessary. Thus at no resolution they make any sense; but they look ridiculous for different reasons.
Fira Code came in second, and that's fair, I've used it on occasion, I like it.
I feel like Chivo Mono[1] would make a decent programming font — if a programming version of it were to exist, anyway.
I also like Go Mono[2], and although they're rather different to what I usually go for, I can see the appeal of the M+ mono[3] fonts.
For those of a more whimsical inclination, Fantasque Sans Mono[4] seems like it might be cool for you.
[1]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Chivo+Mono
[2]: https://go.dev/blog/go-fonts
[3]: https://mplusfonts.github.io/
[4]: https://belluzj.github.io/projects/design/fantasquesansmono-...
2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41604781
2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29010443
- An ELO-based version with many more variables, so that I can open the site from time to time and find more nice fonts
- Some global stats
- Not losing the leaderboard after reloading
- Spline Sans Mono
https://github.com/ericfortis/verdanacamel
Anecdotal solely to me, very unnerving and even with formatting marks enabled makes me feel uneasy seeing a space without a space formatting mark.
It's amazing to me how many of the fonts in this bracket have lower-case ell and one as nearly identical (both with a line at the base and some protrusion to the left at the top).
On improvement would be to allow scalling different fonts to different sizes. With them all at (e.g.) 16pt, there is a wildly different amount of text on the screen.
1: https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans
I wish the sample text included _underscores_, since I have occasionally found that they disappear with certain combinations of font + size + renderer.
And a run of all the numeric digits 0123456789, to show how their heights align.
And [square brackets], to show how easily they are distinguished from certain other glyphs.
And the vertical | bar, for the same reason.
...
Adobe Source Code Pro and Ubuntu Mono were my finalists. I think my preference would come down to window and font size, since Ubuntu Mono seemed to be narrower and leave more space between lines.
(Also, I kind of rushed the first few comparisons, so it's possible that I prematurely eliminated a typeface that I would have liked more.)
But in general, I think obsessing over the monospace font you use for coding is, ultimately, bike shedding. I've used a lot of different fonts over the year, not because I was trying to find the best one, but because I used the default font of whatever tool I was using at the time, and - guess what - I was fine with it every time.
Plex is a beautiful font, and one of the few corporate fonts that I actually think works, while being recognizable as being IBM.
(FWIW, I just did the codingfont bracket and got Source Code Pro, which I've used in the past, along with Iosevka and Commit Mono)
[1] https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono
Also, about half of these fonts look utterly unsuitable for coding to me. Nobody really needs serifs and loopy l's in a coding font, surely?
I remember seeing another font that I liked but I didn't manage to check what font it was before the game showed the winner. Looks like I have to play it again. Not on mobile at least, the webpage was hard to interact on Android Chrome.
Suggestion: I'd like to have an option to exclude fonts without ligatures from the game. And it seems there are others who don't like ligatures who would probably like to be able to exclude fonts with ligatures. You could also do this for other features like serifs.
At the same time, it would be wonderful if window sizes were more consistent (now things are obstructed, with scrolling, etc). And I would love to download the ranking graph!
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42554715
Results: Roboto Mono !
Reminded me of Sun consoles.
Now I can have side-by-side two editors plus a Structure or Project pane at the left in PyCharm while having 120 chars visible in both editors.
I found this somewhere on the internet. Haven't been able to know what this font is.
I also remember some nice ones designed to look like a smoothed VT-220 one.
But I prefer (and use) PragmataPro (not free) and it is not part of the test, sadly.
Seeing all the fonts listed here it would be great to be able to add user submissions into the mix.
I eventually had to buy one I liked, and non-free fonts won’t ever show up in sites like these.
(It’s called “Codelia” if curious.)
So Aptos Mono or Consolas it is.
Like, some fonts look to weird/unusual that I dislike. But most look just fine and I don't really care.
Am I weird? Do I lack taste?
- Ligatures or not
- *: in the middle (better for things like multiplication), or high (better for things like C pointers)
- Alignment of =, >, - some fonts align -, = and > to that "=>" and "->" look good, others will not, making it arguably look better in isolation, others will optimize for ligatures
- The "i" may look significantly different, some will prioritize consistency, others will prioritize making il1I look distinct. Same idea for 0/O
- Aspect ratio, do you want a wide font, making alignment, indentation, and special characters clearer, or a narrow font, allowing you to cram longer lines into a single screen.
These are compromises, and depending on your style and language, you may prefer one or the other.
My favorites, however, aren't even there.
(Pearl8x8, Spleen, Terminus)
That's the one i have been using for many years, look like i made the right choice
I'm using Liberation Mono, and it's missing :( i got PT Mono though.
[0]: https://www.recursive.design/ and also available on Google Fonts[1]
[1]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Recursive
What I'm missing is DejaVuSansMono which is what I'm using. The result of the test was Ubuntu Mono, which looks okay too.
https://philpl.gumroad.com/l/dank-mono
The one use case I've seen for Dank Mono was presentations with an overhead projector at conferences. The cursive for italics can make some of the structure of the code more differentiated when viewing it at a distance.
I'm disappointed in you today, HN
2. What does "press arrow" do?
3. Do "choose" and "press arrow" do the same or do they do different things?