
Mononoki – A Font for Programming and Code Review - nikolay
https://madmalik.github.io/mononoki/
======
s9w
I've added it to the programming font comparison at
[http://s9w.io/font_compare/](http://s9w.io/font_compare/)

~~~
otterpro
This is cool. Do you take request to add font to your site? If so, could you
also add one of my favorite font Nanum Gothic to
sw9w.io?([http://dev.naver.com/projects/nanumfont/download/](http://dev.naver.com/projects/nanumfont/download/)).
Although it is relatively unknown, I haven't found any programming font I like
except this one.

~~~
kseistrup
ArchLinux users kan find Nanum Gothic in AUR:

[https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-
nanumgothic_coding/](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-
nanumgothic_coding/)

[https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-
nanum/](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-nanum/)

------
hackuser
From someting I prepared long ago, easily confused glyphs, depending on the
typeface (if you aren't sure what one of the characters is ... perhaps try a
different typeface?):

    
    
         * b69B80Oo
         * 1Il|
         * ij
         * 5S
         * 9gq
         * co
         * rn m
         * cl d
         * vv w
         * .,
         * :;
         * `'
         * ''"
         * ' and (curved/smart/curly single quotes)
         * " and (curved/smart/curly double quotes)
         * ~-
         * )]}
         * u and (mu)
         * v and (nu)
         * Capital vs. lowercase letters.
            wW
            xX
            zZ
            vV
            uU
            cC
            sS
    
    

Note that many of the above are easier to distinguish because they are next to
each other and you are conciously examining them. You need to read your code
and know a character is a colon and not a semicolon without even thinking
about it.

~~~
unexistance
ha thanks :D used to decide on fonts based on 0Oo 1Il| only

------
anotheryou
I like this source code pro fork with ligatures (at times more irritating than
useful, but sexy):

[https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig](https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig)

edit: switched to Fira Code Light (now that there is a light version)

[https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode](https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode)

------
Paul_S
A sample would be nice. Look at this one that another commenter here linked
to: [https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig](https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig).
Samples! You immediately know what it's about.

I don't think a ttf font can't compete with a handmade raster one like
Terminus. Maybe on high dpi displays?

------
kbenson
_Monospace - This is an universal requirement for source code typography. It
's not just an historic artifact from the olden days of terminals, but an
useful convention to allow two dimensional structuring and highlighting
differences on the character level._

Well, since there are people that swear by using variable space fonts for
programming, it's not necessarily a universal requirement. I agree it is a
very useful convention though, and prefer monospace fonts for terminals and
programming myself.

~~~
jowiar
I'm waiting for the editor with a layout engine that doesn't assume monospace
-- the tooling is a bigger problem than anything else for variable-width
fonts.

~~~
kbenson
Slightly related, I've been thinking for a while how an editor that tracked
indentation and made each indentation/scope a different background shade
and/or slightly smaller font might be interesting to play with. Does anyone
know of a system that uses this?

~~~
terhechte
There's a package for emacs to do that:
[http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/color-
box.png](http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/color-box.png)

[http://foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/](http://foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/)

~~~
kbenson
Thanks! Now I wonder what it looks like if you keep dropping the font a point.

------
optforfon
I feel like this is a bit heretical, but I feel like fonts in practice are
something that you just kinda get used to after a day of use.

The only time you're really aware of them is when you look at two fonts side
by side. So the trick for me has been to use the same font everywhere in my
system. For me that's been Noto/Noto-Mono. They're trying to eventually cover
all of Unicode and I personally (after a bit of adjustment) really like the
long and skinny. It also has really nice Asian characters natively so it
doesn't ever look goofy

------
akamaka
Does anyone else find most programming fonts to be overly heavyweight? I end
up sticking with Courier New because of its light, thin lines, even though
it's not a perfect font.

Are there any other monospace fonts with light weights?

~~~
jakub_g
(going offtopic) Seems everyone has a different taste. I prefer medium-weight
fonts, Courier is way too light for me. Do you work on a Mac BTW? I think
there might be some massive rendering difference between Macs and other OSes.
You can tell by reading people's blogs. Some authors use super narrow, gray-
on-white font, which is generally unreadable on Windows, but I think it may
look just fine on macbooks.

Personally, depending on editor (each editor has slightly different rendering,
spacing, interline etc.), I'm using DejaVu Sans Mono or Lucida Console.

I dislike Consolas, because it's too blurry for me; so much that I generally
immediately delete it from my OS installation, in order for it to not show up
when I'm reading coding blogs.

~~~
tomsmeding
Indeed, rendering makes a huge difference between OS'es. Personally, I find
the Mac (and iOS, those are equal I think) rendering quite nice, the Windows
rendering reasonable, and the Linux rendering (at least in gnome, don't know
about other wm's?) just ugly, but that's just my opinion. :P

------
mmgutz
Nice looking font with flare to it :) Maybe I've been using Source Code Pro
and Consolas for too long.

A few things caught my eye:

\- '(' and ')' do not align vertically

\- '(' looks odd next to '0'

\- 'e' and 'c' look too similar at smaller pt

------
maxaf
One day I'll come across a monospace font that will look & feel as good as the
Bloomberg Terminal font.

~~~
elcapitan
Interesting - had to look that up.

Here's a Quora post about it: [https://www.quora.com/What-font-is-used-in-
Bloomberg-Termina...](https://www.quora.com/What-font-is-used-in-Bloomberg-
Terminal) . It's designed by Matthew Carter, the designer of Georgia and
Verdana, he's an expert on screen-readable fonts.

The interesting thing is that one part of the optimization for finance was all
those special fraction glyphs. I have never seen such weird fractions in
actual use, I would have thought people use normal decimal numbers everywhere.

~~~
maxaf
When I worked at Bloomberg, the origins of that font weren't a mystery. I used
it on my company-issued Mac and loved it. Whatever they paid for it, the price
was definitely worth it.

I don't suppose I'll ever find a suitable replacement, which also means that I
jump at every opportunity to try out a new monospace font. I currently have 7
in my .Xdefaults, and these are just the ones I kinda-sorta liked and hadn't
deleted.

~~~
elcapitan
Which is kind of the opposite experience many people have who work at a
company that has its 'company font' which they are supposed to use, but nobody
likes to, because it's just print-optimized for design etc, but not screen-
optimized for normal work use, and thus makes it a pain to edit documents.

~~~
maxaf
It's one of those rare situations when programmers can benefit from the
development of a product meant to please an entirely orthogonal audience:
uber-picky finance professionals who stare at screens all day. Life is
fascinating, isn't it?

~~~
elcapitan
Absolutely.

------
PhasmaFelis
This is quite nice, and I really appreciate the proper differentiation of
similar characters. It still gets a bit blurry at low point sizes, though. If
you're after a font that is pixel-crisp at small sizes (and don't mind if it
doesn't size up all that well), check out Proggy bitmap fonts:
[http://upperbounds.net/](http://upperbounds.net/)

------
nathancahill
My favorite font for Sublime.

~~~
UncleSam
You are referring to the color scheme, not the font. The default font for your
Sublime Text is probably either Monospace, Consolas, or Menlo Regular.

Yes, this will confuse a lot of people who enjoy the default color scheme of
Sublime. This is something completely different.

~~~
nathancahill
I use the Dawn x Github color scheme[0] and the Mononoki font.

[0] [https://github.com/AlexanderEkdahl/github-sublime-
theme](https://github.com/AlexanderEkdahl/github-sublime-theme)

~~~
UncleSam
I apologize - I did not notice the slight variance in spelling and made a
hasty assumption.

------
dfbrown
I'm not a fan of 0 (zero) having rounded sides and O having straight sides, I
think it should be the other way around.

------
kazinator
The @ character in this font looks odd; the center loop is filled in, so it
looks like something from Thai script. But no other glyph (in the ASCII range
of the font) has this feature, so it is glaringly inconsistent.

I used this for a day, then ditched it. Back to a Courier derivative for me.
There is a reason we have fonts with serifs: they provide visual clues to the
eyes. Sans-serif is slick, but less readable. We might compare this to taking
the high frequencies out of audio. The sound is "smooth", but lacks clarity.

Mononoki _looks_ great in screen-shots; I might consider it again when I'm
having some golden piece of source code printed 40 inches wide and framed for
hanging on a wall. So long as that code doesn't contain @ symbols.

~~~
kazinator
I spent a bunch of time searching for good monospaced fonts as a result of
this submission.

Luxi Mono stood out as very decent.

I settled on a font called Consolas.

I use it not only in Vim, PuTTY and Cygwin console windows on Windows, but ...
in Gnome Terminal on Ubuntu.

Thank you, Microsoft!

------
planckscnst
Pretty nice. Since the line in the 0 is so shallow, it looks a lot like the θ.
I prefer dotted 0 because it's a character that frequently repeated as in
"100000" and the slants all together there makes it feel skewed and
uncomfortable.

------
valbaca
This looks awful on a Mac at size <= 12, super fuzzy compared to Menlo

------
microcolonel
This typeface is excellent, and it might replace Envy Code R for me. I've
liked working with Envy, but it is nonfree and I don't have permission to
distribute it with new glyphs. This is a bummer since I wanted more complete
Hellenic and a full set of Cyrillic characters including Ukrainian extras, and
was willing to draw the glyphs. This complete turnoff may be one of the main
reasons I switch to Mononoki. Mononoki also looks far better on higher
resolution displays, something I'm investing in right now.

------
PaulHoule
My eyes are burning. Gimmie the old 3270 terminal typeface anyday!

~~~
engi_nerd
[https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font](https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font)

In case you didn't already know that this exists.

------
boondaburrah
Cool, but what I really need to know is if two characters next to each other
make a square, such that I can have CJK characters in the same line and not
muck up the formatting.

~~~
kazinator
I just got this to work in Windows with gvim. While the mononoki font doesn't
have any Kanji in it, in Vim you can separately configure a font for the
"wide" characters. I have:

    
    
      :set guifont=mononoki:h11:cANSI
      :set guifontwide=MS_Mincho:h11:cANSI
    

With this, East Asian characters show up fine. They don't look good next to
the mononoki but the spacing is good. MS_Gothic looks a bit better, since it
has the simplified, blocky kanji strokes.

Basically this mixture of two fonts, one for one-space-characters and another
for the Unicode two-spacers, is up to your editor to get right.

I tried increasing the size of the guifontwide. No matter what size I pick,
the alignment is correct; for excessively large sizes of the wide font
relative to the regular one, the kanji just start to get jammed together.
Basically you have to increase their sizes together to avoid the cramping.

------
GreaterFool
You'll have to pry Terminus out of my cold dead hands!

Seriously though, I appreciate people making fonts! Variety is great and
sometimes just changing fonts for a while is refreshing.

------
comex
Not that it matters, but I wonder where the name came from. It sounds Japanese
(although the first part is obviously inspired by 'monospace'), but 'mononoki'
isn't a Japanese word. There are many ways it could be interpreted as a
combination of two words, though, or it could be a corruption of 'mononoke' (a
spirit).

~~~
bydo
It could be three words: mono no ki. Mono (as 物) is generally "thing," which
doesn't really work, but we can assume it's being used as simply mono (in loan
form, モノ), short for "monospace," here. No (の) is a particle indicating
possession, and "ki" (as 気) is "spirit" or "essence" (with different kanji it
could be quite a few other things; Japanese has a lot of homophones).

So I suppose we could translate the name to "the essence of monospace," if we
were so inclined, and transliterate it back to Japanese as モノの気.

~~~
madmalik
Creator here. It just sounded nice and there is no deeper meaning. But your
interpretation is great and might as well adopt it :D

------
jtnegrotto
Congrats to the creator, at a glance this looks nice and readable. If I ever
tire of Iosevka I'll give it a try (that's a big if though; Iosevka has the
advantage of being both beautiful and narrow, so I can keep multiple panes
open comfortably).

------
sajithdilshan
It looks so similar to Monaco
[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monaco_(typeface)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monaco_\(typeface\))]

------
ultramancool
It's pretty nice but almost looks stringy to me.

I'm extremely used to Dejavu Sans Mono for both terminal and code usage. Every
time I try to switch to something else I wind up going back.

------
mfb2
Powerline support? Kind of a dealbreaker.

~~~
michaelmior
I agree, but you can patch the font yourself

[https://github.com/powerline/fontpatcher](https://github.com/powerline/fontpatcher)

------
dfc
It looks like Ubuntu Mono with some tweaks. Is there an easy way to compare
font X vs font Y?

------
mikelward
Bonus points for the fizzbuzz reference on the homepage. You now have my
attention.

------
Kinnard
This looks cool. But how does it help with formatting and code review?

------
perlpimp
on mac non-antialised version looks to be the case with mild jaggies. not that
pleasant. if there is a solution i'd like to hear it, font otherwise looks
good.

------
satysin
Pretty font but looks like shit in Visual Studio 2015. I blame VS though as it
only seems to render Consolas well which has pissed me off a lot since the
switch to their WPF-based editor in VS2010. Sigh.

------
alexdowad
Cool, I like it! Thanks, Matthew!

------
Pulce
[http://www.fontspace.com/philing/braille-
normal](http://www.fontspace.com/philing/braille-normal)

