I tried a couple Mono Fonts and found them all kinda samey.
I ended up seeing a post here for Berkeley Mono, a paid font, and I noticed in particular that it was incredibly readable compared to other mono fonts I was using, so much so that I've zoomed out one level on VS Code and iTerm and have similar readability as before.
It was the first font I paid for, and I was quite happy with it.
I felt weird buying Berkeley but I’m very happy with it as well. I knew I liked it when I got the trial and yet I felt this aversion to paying for a font for several weeks. Then it dawned on me: I was depriving myself of enjoying someone’s hard work because I didn’t want to spend a fairly small amount of money for a thing I’d use for my work every day. Sort of an everyone loses situation. I can be bizarrely cheap, and it’s kind of embarrassing when I break it down. I lose time and money to my irrational cheapness.
Berkeley’s sharpness and legibility has been unmatched for me and I think that’s what draws me to it so much. I know others will say it’s not sharp or legible, and it’s a totally personal thing. We get good at reading on different screens with different characters, and we’re gradually trained to see in different ways. For me, Berkeley absolutely nails it.
I too have been following the Berkeley Mono font, and I think their website and promo materials are all very well designed. However, I tried the trial version of the font and found the kerning odd and unnatural seeming.
I can relate to GP's feeling here. When I first installed Berkeley Mono and looked at some code in it, I had the same reaction: the spacing between characters looked inconsistent in some words. I think that some other monospace fonts do a better job of making the narrow characters ("i", "l", etc.) match the width of wider characters.
That said, I've been using it for a couple weeks now, and have stopped noticing that.
My main issue with it now is that some italic glyphs get cut off in my terminal, but I'm not sure if that's the font's fault or my terminal's fault.
You're correct. I had assumed it was the "i" and "l" that were giving the "something is off about this text" feeling, but I just opened up some sample text to try to figure out exactly which characters are doing it and can see that the "i" and "l" actually look fine to me.
It seems like the "r" is actually the main culprit. The spacing before and after "r" tends to feel too big to my eye.
I used the wrong term but you nailed it. The 'r' is definitely a problem for me too.
EDIT: Ok, I feel like this demonstrates the issue pretty well. The 'r' is a problem for sure, but notice how off balance the rest of the word looks? Evidently, there is no kerning (as I've learned) with monospace fonts, but then why does the spacing between these letters appear to variable to my eyes? The spacing between the 'om' looks weird too. This is just a screen shot from Font Book.
Fira Code and others do an ugly thing with 'r' that is a huge point of contention. There is a thread on Github that describes the frustration well: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/issues/601
This is a fundamental trade off between aesthetics of the char itself vs. the aesthetics of spacing between chars. It comes down to personal preference and fits the "boring" description from Berkeley Mono marketing page.
Perhaps there should be an option for two types of 'r', one with a base and one without. That'd be great!
> This is actually a problem with any font that has an 'r' without a base.
>
> For example, Andale Mono: https://i.imgur.com/PeLZrj4.png
But in Berkeley Mono it'd be easily fixable: when the lowercase r's upperbar is a straight horizontal line (as it is in Berkeley but not in Andale Mono), you can simply make that horizontal bar a little tiny bit wider, which shall give the illusion things are more balanced.
I did create my own font with a 'r' like that (but I cannot share it as I stole inspiration from commercial fonts).
If you look at the word "proc" and "return" here [1], it looks great and extremely well balanced. There is also a problem of choosing specific examples like the word "random" which has a bad pairing with "ra". You're right though, it can be improved.
You make it sound like I engineered this. "Random" was the first word that came to my mind because it was random. If you install the trial font, you'll notice this off balance look in a lot of the text you type, not just the example word I chose.
Even if monospace doesn't have "kerning" can't they create a "ligature" for "ra" instead? Doesn't have to be a weird hybrid symbol, just tweak the spacing so it looks right.
I keep glancing at Berkeley Mono's site since it popped up on HN recently when they added ligatures. As a Fira Code user for some time now the ligatures are a "must have" for me, so that helps a lot. Something about the overtly 70s Mainframe aesthetic doesn't quite hit for me (though very well crafted and almost), though I have to say what little is currently teased for their next font Houston Mono has me intrigued enough to sign up for their mailing list.
Why? This whole article and almost are all the comments are on how many existing choices there are and "designer supports ligatures" is an easy enough filter to find a good, strong subset. I don't need it to be anything more than a filter of current options.
I ended up seeing a post here for Berkeley Mono, a paid font, and I noticed in particular that it was incredibly readable compared to other mono fonts I was using, so much so that I've zoomed out one level on VS Code and iTerm and have similar readability as before.
It was the first font I paid for, and I was quite happy with it.
https://berkeleygraphics.com/typefaces/berkeley-mono/