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.
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.