I can only really judge a font when its loaded in my system, running in my setup. I wish font makers targeting developers would release trial fonts (with some essential chars missing or similar), so that we could test them properly before paying.
I am always looking for a better font, and this one looks like it may be an improvement over my current one.
My thoughts exactly. Berkeley Mono looks great on the website and in the PDF data sheet, but the real test is how does it look in my terminal and editor, especially when compared side-by-side with my current preferred font (Pragmata Pro; also commercial but well worth it!)
I purchased Berkeley Mono to give it a shot. While I found it visually appealing, it still cannot compete in the terminal against Pragmata Pro due to how narrow Pragmata Pro is. I can fit so much more on my screen yet still have it be clean and legible with Pragmata Pro.
We've been working on a condensed version, it has been almost complete (all 440+ glyphs) since last year but it has a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out. This will also enable a Width ('wdth') axis on variable fonts so if your editor supports, can smoothly go from Regular ---> Condensed ---> Compressed versions.
There is also a complete Extended version but it has many issues, we won't be releasing that anytime soon.
Thanks and good feedback, beta testing was done in a similar way - font cut with a few missing glyphs and was limited to ASCII-basic set. I'll see if I can extend this more generally.
One idea to consider... offer the font but with the vowels jumbled around and the digits jumbled around. I can see everything I need. But would need to buy it if I really want to use it.
Yes please - in my case because fonts look different on Windows and Mac (and Linux?) and I've been caught a few times after buying fonts that looked great only to discover all screenshots were from Macs and on Windows it was nothing like it.
I'd second the vote for some "testing" fonts. At the very least, could you include some screenshots of larger chunks of code, with {} etc? I can't really tell how this will look on a screen full of code.
The same think happens with this font, as with some many others. It's absolutely beautiful, it looks like it was just designed for coding. Then I see actual code written with the font and goes: "Well, that was disappointing".
Don't get me wrong, it beautiful, easy to read and the price is right (in my opinion), but when you see the Python, even at 17pt, it seems squished. The characters just blurs together. This font either requires insane amounts of whitespace around it, or a high font size, I'm guessing no less than 20pt. Maybe it's just the line height that makes it weird, the characters seems like they need to be wider to avoid losing details.
Send me an email[1] and I can send you a beta copy to try out. IMO the picture doesn't do the justice (it is not like the way you describe it at all), but I am seriously considering creating a specific license for a trial + font cut that is missing a few glyphs. That's going to take some time. Here is some feedback from this thread :) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30559060
Of course, I use it daily for writing code but I am biased :)
Trial versions are ready and already sent to the mailing list! Please send us an email if you want to try now. Should be generally available on the website this week.
I agree, although I'm not sure if it's partly an unflattering screenshot. To me some of the lowercase letters look a bit indistinct (especially the 'e's and 'a's).
MonoLisa has a playground where you can paste code snippets and try the font - that might be a good approach for other fonts aimed at developers. https://www.monolisa.dev/playground
MonoLisa also has a trial version. [1] They have a great site, I love the font, and the availability of a free trial was the icing on the cake. Great experience all around.
Looks nice in principle, but being suitable for the actual daily use (for coding) will depend on how it renders in a specific IDE at a specific size on a specific OS. There's LOTS of mono fonts that look great in larger sizes or on Macs, but that all but unbearable to look at in smaller sizes on Windows.
There's no mention of this font having a manually hinted TTF version, which is pretty much required for rendering under these conditions. This gives me a very big pause. As others have said - at $75 a pop this font absolutely needs a downloadable, installable and usable trial. How it looks in PDF and rendered to a bitmap may showcase its design well, but not its real-world usage. That's assuming that the author means to position it also as a coding font (which seems to be the case judging by the samples).
TTF hinting is automatic, using vertical and horizontal stem widths. Manual hinting is WIP. I've gotten feedback for trial fonts, please sign up for notifications at the bottom of the page and we'll email you when that's properly available. It requires some font engineering and writing up a license for it.
Thanks for working on this. I’ve always been into type and hand-lettering, did a bit of letterpress work, am almost done with a graphic design BFA where I really dug into type and typesetting. I also spent the last 12 years as a developer (and also interface design most recently,) and the better part of the prior decade in nix systems administration and software support… monospaced fonts are a bizarrely perfect convergence of interests! I also applaud your willingness to solicit open critique from folks outside the field. The domain the font is hosted on indicates you do design work professionally, so I’ll offer a customarily frank ‘pinned up on the wall in the studio’ design critique. Apologies if it seems overly frank. I only offer it because I think it’s worth critiquing.
Based on this screenshot, the readability suffers because the typographic color (edit for non-type-nerds… basically the density of ink in any block of text if printed in black)* is too dark. Single lines aren’t bad even if words could stand to be tracked out a touch, but the density makes entire blocks pretty tough to parse quickly, which is a showstopper for scanning logs. Outside of a terminal, you could mitigate it with leading and tracking to some extent. Even then, the combination of slightly heavy stroke weight, tall x-height, and comparatively tight packing make it feel pretty cramped.
Formally, the glyphs generally sit nicely as well-balanced individual artifacts, but the relationships don’t materialize to form visually fluid words. For example, if you look at “BERKELEY” in your title SVG, the slope on top of the B and R either needs to start later or needs to be more severe. With the strong horizontal created by the cap line in all the other letters, the very slight curve starting that early makes it seem uneven rather than softened. There isn’t enough horizontal momentum or obvious departure from it to look deliberate, and everything else is too uniform for that subtlety to look appropriate. Menlo, as probably the closest mono analog, resolves that tension by starting the curve later and making giving it a more deliberate attack.
I don’t think this has too far to go before being adapted, but those types of issues are what I’d expect to see in an open source type family rather than a $75 bundle. Having a flat price and throwing in a bunch of extra seats compared to the big foundries doesn’t really make sense. To business customers, $75 once vs some user based licensing billed out periodically doesn’t make much of a difference. Individual folks hesitate to pay $39 for Matthew Carter’s gorgeous Big Caslon because they don’t want to pay $39, not because they don’t get enough seats.
You know those pictures where it says "the longer you look the worse it gets" - this is the opposite of that. The longer I look at this site, the more I love it.
Yes, done by hand, a lot of elbow grease. Same with the animation which took an insane amount of time (700 frames). Shout out to MonoDraw (Berkeley Mono works wonderfully with it): https://monodraw.helftone.com/
Given the file name “Artboard-2” my guess is that it’s done in Adobe Illustrator, but you can do that in any graphics editing tool like Photoshop, Figma, Sketch, etc.
For typographic work, I recommend a vector-based tool because it scales to any resolution.
I rarely get excited by fonts, but I'm loving this one. I only recently realized how long machine readable fonts have been around while working on a reproduction of the Apollo 11 flight plan. I love how this one has some of their flavor while still being easy on the eyes.
The licensing is unclear/vague/contradictory... I'm totally confused what the 'developer' license actually means when it says you can use it for "personal use in professional context, but not commercial." And how is a subscription for a print product handled? Do I have to burn my printed materials if I don't renew a subscription?
Font vendors seem to _love_ coming up with weird snowflake licensing schemes rather than trying to stick with something well understood.
I actually wanted to make it simpler. Separating professional use (this is how Input Mono font does it) and commercial use allows developers to use fonts for their daily work, but the machine belongs to their employer and the work they do is for their employer; while also being able to provide a separate Commercial license for companies and businesses.
There are no page view limits for websites (no trackers), installation limits , epub/ebook limits, etc. Basically it is along the lines of FontSpring's worry free license and I think its even better.
Thanks, that's what I thought it was _trying_ to say, but I'm not sure that's what it actually _does_ say.
You might look at the jetbrains individual license for some language that I think is more clear and objective: A personal license must be paid for by a single named individual, not paid or reimbursed by a company, and is not re-assignable, while the organizational license is more a "floating seat" that can be paid by a company and assigned to individual employees as needed. That helps sidestep the mess of trying to define what is "professional but not commercial."
Also, under a subscription model I'd want some assurance that previously created print materials receive a perpetual license even if I didn't renew and that I wouldn't have to try to excise it from everywhere I've used it in the past if the license ever lapsed.
Does this mean that if I am a one-man-freelancing-shop I need a commercial license rather than a developer license?
As a follow up: If I work for SuperMegaCorp as a W-2 employee, I obviously qualify for a developer license, but as a 1099 contractor? And if I send a PDF invoice that uses this font - is that professional or commercial usage? Clearly, I am not a lawyer ;)
Print licensing is very standard and used by the majority of the font fountries with exception of Lineto and a few others. For example, buy 1 seat (1 designer) and that designer can make unlimited print products as long as they have the seat to use it. It is based on installation on a computer that is used to develop the print materials. Some font fountries prevent the use of embedding fonts in the distributed media (such as PDFs).
Where I made an explicit exception in the license is for developers using the typeface in IDEs, and using it in professional context. Also check input mono license which is where I got the inspiration from: https://input.djr.com/license/
The input mono license is very clear to me, either the font is distributed/published or it isn't. "Publish" and "distribute" have very clear meanings that refer to the use of the licensed material.
I think you need to go over the license copy with an attorney or native English speaker, since I am still left confused by your comments.
What about the one-user, commercial shop? Seems like commercial is minimum 10 users, but personal/developer is more expensive per user. Does a one man shop need to pay $250 for commercial use, or $75?
I like the font. I'd pay $75 for a license if it works for editing code.
The problem is that it typically takes a week or so of use to determine if it would work for me. I'm not going to pay $75 for something that I won't know if I have any use for.
Very effective presentation. It looks fantastic. Will be good value at $75 for some people but not for me with so many other great mono fonts available (many with code ligatures). Probably better for designers than coders. With small fonts for everyday I don't see any big difference in readibilty beyond something like Fira Code unles you are very particular. Beyond that it is mostly taste (or lack of) but then I currently use Comic Code Ligature so I am clearly crazy.
I very much welcome the new wave of mono fonts being developed recently. As a visually impaired person who has issues differentiating fonts on different backgrounds, the variety of fonts is very important as it allows me to find the optimal font for the environment and color contrast. Mono variety used to be limited but I can see a renaissance now!
I am personally not a fan of ligatures, but since they seem to be entirely optional and controlled by the IDE, I think it would be nice to see them included. For people not like me, because it won't hurt me, and will broaden the appeal.
I like the typeface but I think it would be helpful to have a way for someone to copy and paste their code as a preview but I think that if you allowed that then others could download your font for free. You might want to mention that it costs $75 above the fold and I would think that you would want also to center the column of the site itself (these are nitpicks though).
One option to allow users to preview the font while not letting them download it for free is to have them submit their code sample, render an image of it on the server, then send that back to the user. Not as nice as rendering the font in browser, of course, but it works.
I was thinking that but others also mentioned to have a trial mode font that didn’t have a complete character set also. Rendering a picture might become costly.
I am impressed by how quickly the page loaded, looked at the source code and what do you know? No modern UI library being used, semantic class names and not a lot of code being loaded. I'm impressed by the simplicity!
I really like the font, but I doubt that a claim of “wide language support” can be made when Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and other scripts are not supported.
ISO 8859-1 Latin-1 Western European
ISO 8859-2 Latin-2 Central European
ISO 8859-3 Latin-3 South European
ISO 8859-4 Latin-4 North European
ISO 8859-9 Latin-5 Turkish
ISO 8859-10 Latin-6 Nordic
ISO 8859-13 Latin-7 Baltic Rim
ISO 8859-15 Latin-9 Finnish, Estonian
ISO 8859-16 Latin-10 South-Eastern European
I do not have any problems paying for something that I will use several hours every day. But would like to try the font in my editor before purchasing.
Could have a demo download that only contains the most common letters like A-z0-9 and the brackets etc ([{:,.-_|&! Sure many will use the "demo" forever, but those people might be future customers and mouth-to-mouth marketers
I know I'm the niche of the niche, but many fonts I tried, have problems rendering Turkish characters e.g "ş" "ı" "ğ" "ü", does the font support these, if yes, could we get a screenshot with iTerm2 if possible? :)
These are good fonts but it’s unclear why it’s not released under a proper font license like SIL Open Font License. This would make the use of the fonts much easier.
I wish the page had more examples at, say, the 10pt size which is more comparable to what I am using in my editor. The huge copy in the examples look beautiful but they hardly map to real world usage so not entirely helpful...
+1000. It would also be useful to see it rendered at small sizes on different OS's -- macOS and Windows and some X environments -- because the font renderers on different platforms produce different visual results and the differences are often more visible at smaller sizes.
I think this is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Of course the creators should get paid, its a lifetime license, I'm going to forgo some of my usual BS purchases and get it.
Because the user is typically looking at the center of a screen.
Sure, you can organize you windows in a way to compensate and center the content manually. But I think there are two usage patterns:
1. maximized browser windows
2. non maximized windows
For the first pattern, the above statement is essential. Naturally, the user is looking at the center of the screen. The second pattern is somewhat unpredictable, because you neither know where the window is on the screen nor the size of it. But the typical behavior for centering content (`margin: 0 auto;`) does not make any difference compared to left aligned content when the window is smaller than the content. The only hard to judge situation is, when the window is not maximized, but larger than the content and I think for that case it is pretty hard to judge if left aligned or centered content is superior.
As a dev who constantly switches out fonts / themes & also pays for them, a few things to note:
- I mainly test for clarity, how HD something is on my IDE from 12 to 16px. I paid for Monolisa (which I like a lot) but other open source fonts actually have higher fidelity(Luculent, Fairfax HD, Hermit, Agave) - this gives me pause on purchase of license.
- No ligatures isn’t a deal breaker, but many open source fonts have them Day 1 & are implementing them well. My work place has lambdas & operators all over code base - some fonts make it easier to parse around.
- Price is not bad overall, as I feel paid fonts are Quality of Life coder tools, like mechanical keyboards (pro surfers don’t use surfboards from Walmart).
- Summary is that I’m on the verge to take the plunge but really need a day or 2 in the trenches with it to see how I flow with it. Trial version should exist like others say. Similarities to JetBrains Mono are there even if unintentionally so.
- I support indie mono fonts, keep iterating!
i actually really like the font, but I'm super turned off by the copy. i feel like this kind of writing belongs on a wine bottle or in a calvin klein catalog. to each their own, i suppose.
I enquired and I was told in no uncertain terms that the license forbids patching. This means that you cannot use the popular Nerd Fonts [1] patch set for adding missing glyphs. I hope that will change as I would like to use this typeface.
That's quite disappointing. As a Neovim user, I depend on nerd fonts for icons.
Does the license forbid patching even for personal use? Or is it only forbidden to re-distribute the patched font, by using it on a website for example?
Love this, but I find the yearly / per-seat pricing for commercial use very hostile. Nobody wants to be chasing bills for a single typeface in their project. A one-off charge somewhere between $300-$999 would be much more attractive, buy-and-forget.
You could support Hungarian with only two additional letters.
I find the subscription license for commercial use a bit problematic. Say I have an app and I want to use the font. That’s “commercial” as long as it’s not “personal” AFAICT… and if I stop paying your fee some day then technically the app has to be modified or taken down.
This might not be a problem, but it’s not really “no strings attached.” There should be a fixed-fee perpetual commercial license as well.
Best of luck with it, I’m sure it’s hard to compete with all the free developer fonts!
If you look at the Burgevouns comparison Berkley mono is the least good. It's compared to non-mono fonts which, naturally, have better kerning. Having three different representations of the number 0 including one that is indistinguishable from upper case o makes this a no-no for coding from my point of view. It's one of the first things I look for and why I love Hack.
We offer downloads of pre-configured stylistic sets (variations). All you need to do is download the specific version and install it. In applications such as Adobe Illustrator, you can select the variant using Open Type features: https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/special-characters...
Nope, you didn't miss anything. The license is $75 for the developer package, you use it unlimited times, anywhere you want (except commercial use) and you get unlimited updates.
I was excited for it, but I cannot justify the price.
I may however consider the $25/year for commercial use if I ever want to use it.
Why the alternative version of "7"? The alternative zeroes are useful because zero looks like capital O, but with what would I confuse a "7"? Or is it there for another reason?
7 is similar to the italic 1, I guess.
but also, the hand written version of 7 was taught to us, in Hungary, in the 1980s, with a small horizontal cross-line on the slanted stem of the 7.
we quickly abandoned that small detail when writing, because we never saw that on printed material, though in writing 1 & 7 can be similar
Oh my word just installed these- They look absolutely dope. If anything it looks better in my actual terminal than on the website. very happy to pay for such great design.
Also the checkout flow on the website was super-slick. Nice job all round.
But I’m glad you asked. Learn about how font characters are structured[0]. Then zoom in, inspect and compare the details of a few characters from both fonts. This will help you understand how they’re different.
At a risk of sounding unfriendly, the best way I know is to look at them side by side.
They are different fonts.
A lot of good looking mono fonts look very similar and there is a reason for that. As designers fine tune features for better legibility (main concern with terminal typeface) fonts converge to look roughly the same. But they still have different feel when you get a lot of text on a screen.
A very distinctive feature of Berkeley Mono seems to be the squared-circle used in the rounded characters, where Roboto has very circular characters. I'm sure there a lot more differences if I saw them side-by-side, but that's the most obvious one for this font snob.
> Berkeley Mono wears a UNIX T-shirt and aspires to be etched on control panels in black synthetic lacquer. It is Adrian Frutiger visits Bell Labs. It is Gene Kranz's command. It operates with calibrated precision and has a datasheet.
It costs $75 for an individual license, not really in the spirit of UNIX
I wasn’t there, but I’ve heard that the AT&T-initiated compiler “debundling” was the thing that kick-started the popularity of the GNU userland, with GCC acting as the gateway drug. So not only are these facts related, they are apparently even causally so.
UNIX was an internal and then commercial product of ATT bell labs (and later Novell). You're misconstruing it with the FOSS movement.
UNIX was created for ATT to sell more telephone service, and then later sold and licensed to other companies to likewise improve their internal computer usage. UNIX was not created to be zero cost. Apparently a commercial license for UNIX cost $20k at the time (or $150 for universities/educational institutions).
edit: IMHO $75 one time is a fair price for a premium font. Designers regularly pay $300 or more for typefaces they use in their work. There are monthly subscriptions to font foundries that cost more too.
The historical origin that I learned for UNIX was that it was created mostly out of frustration with Multics, and that its original "primary" use was running one of Ken Thompson's video games[1]. It was originally written for a PDP-7, which was already obsolete at the time and probably wasn't a target for telecommunications software.
It was only much later (and after significant arm twisting for more computing resources) that AT&T took UNIX seriously. Even then, the first marketed versions of UNIX were oriented towards programmers and technical editors, not telecommunication[2].
It was certainly not created to sell more telephone service. It was a research project that found applications to run on it, most of which had little if anything to do with telephone service at first. Much later UNIX was adapted to run telephone network equipment.
AT&T was in the business of selling telephone service. Bell labs (AT&T owned) was where UNIX was created. Why else would AT&T be researching computer systems if not to broaden and improve their marketshare in telecommunications?
You should read Kernighan’s “UNIX A History and a Memoir”. Seriously a great book.
UNIX was created with no purpose in mind other than to get some MULTICS-like functionality out of an old machine and not worry about design-by-committee.
The first real use for it was document processing and it took off from there. Never was a telecom system ever at AT&T AFAIK and didn’t do networking until much later.
There were no “teams” there, just someone would see what someone else was working on and dive in to help. Stick a bunch of smart people in a building and see what comes out.
R&D at Bell Labs was to play with ideas first and then find an application. That’s how we got the transistor and UNIX, and waaaay more things that never saw the light of day.
That mode of R&D is dead now. It was dying even as UNIX was being developed, and they got management cover. The use for speeding up technical documentation really was the first business value justification. That was also how they managed to get the PDP-11 and how C got created for the port.
My understanding of Bell Labs is that it was funded via a 1% flat "tax" on all Bell System operating companies, and that internally it had no central mission. That's why all kinds of non-telecommunication advancements have come from it: radio astronomy, DNA sequencing machines, solar cells, etc.
I can't find an article for it, but I remember reading somewhere that AT&T's extravagant research budget and forays outside of telecommunications were partially a defensive maneuver: AT&T was aware that the US government could dismantle its monopoly at any moment, and invested heavily in R&D as a token of good faith.
Big if true! Acoustic coupler modems had only existed for a few years when Unix development started, and ARPANET was starting around the same time. It would be an impressive amount of foresight if they predicted that demand for computer networking would become high and that existing OS's would be somehow ill-suited for running its infrastructure.
There were an enormous amount of problems in the telephone space that they hoped computers would resolve, like replacing the army of human operators with computer controlled switches.
> It costs $75 for an individual license, not really in the spirit of UNIX
Eh, I think it’s a fair price, a. And b, pretty apt when you consider most Unixes were priced per core. BSD/OS itself was $1000 back in the day, according to my research, which was cheaper than System V, but obviously still expensive.
Linux was created for a reason.
And here I’ll refrain from making a snarky remark about how someone should make a similar font that is lower quality but will be way more popular.
Yeah, every time a typeface is shared on here it is met with some opposition since most cost money for individuals/personal use. I understand it's hard to take the time to design a nice typeface and that the creators should be compensated for their work, but sadly it means fonts like these are practically limited to commercial use. I wonder if there's a better way to turn a profit on typefaces - there's been a handful of really interesting ones posted on HN I've wanted to try.
There is a ton of entitlement nowadays, that's for sure.
One should be grateful to those who do release their hard work to the public domain or under a FOSS license, rather than being resentful toward those who don't.
People absolutely deserve to be compensated for their work, if they so choose, and they are absolutely permitted to release their work under any license they want.
I think the problem is more that the costs feel exorbitant with respect to both the perceived effort and utility. 75$ is half a year of Netflix - a product clearly born of extensive multi-disciplinary effort - which can't but feel excessive given that the marginal utility of a font is just so low.
I guess I could summarize as saying that an expensive[0] font just isn't, or more strongly, can't be interesting.[1]
[0]More than a cup of coffee, or so.
[1]For personal use, marginal benefits scale differently on e.g. a billboard
Netflix is entertainment, typefaces have a LOT more utility in my life. Maybe I'm weird because I regularly purchase typefaces but $75 is a STEAL. Holy shit.
The commercial license for this is also a steal.
Seems like on here, free typefaces are desired but a lot of these free typefaces are released by multi-million dollar corporations...they have someone on payroll to work on them.
I totally get why they charge, and for what they do - can't blame anyone for not working for free - I just genuinely can't picture a value proposition in the product commiserate with the effort.
At least personally, I find fonts are something that normalize very quickly. If I change the font on my text editor, I'd notice for a day or so but then it would cease to be 'a font' and go back to being 'words on screen'. I've only really noticed 'displeasure' at a working font[1] when I've got two machines and the settings wind up desynced so one doesn't look like 'how it's supposed to' according to my brain.
[0]e.g. if Hacker News changed its font I really might not notice.
You might be interested in futurefonts.xyz. Kind of like Kickstarter for fonts. You pay for typefaces in development. Price goes up as more features and components get added but you get everything that’s included when you buy it and then everything that’s added afterward for no additional cost.
One downside of futurefonts.xyz is that each font comes with a different license. Bit of a headache to keep track of the individual Terms & Conditions as a typical user who might want to use a couple of fonts in a project. Really wish that fonts were sold under more standardized commercial licenses.
At least with many open & free fonts, the SIL Open Font License is practically the standard.
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I am always looking for a better font, and this one looks like it may be an improvement over my current one.