76 comments

  • wartywhoa23 6 hours ago
    Iosevka, my absolutely most loved font for years!

    I've been using a custom version - you can customize the font¹ and build your own ttf (or better yet, ttc) using the build system supplied in the repository².

    be5invis, the author of the font, deserves a special mention for creating a whole custom DSL called PatEL (Parametric Type Expression Language) to generate the font programmatically!

    Renzhi, if you ever come around to read this, thank you so much for Iosevka, man!

    ¹https://typeof.net/Iosevka/customizer

    ²https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/blob/master/doc/custom-b...

    • goatking 1 hour ago
      I am happy it works for you. I am always surprised how much this font is praised, then I try it, and just completely unreadable for me.

      I tried it again, quickly set it up in my terminal the "Iosevka Term" version, switching from Jetbrains Mono, and just don't understand how can people read this.

      • JasonSage 4 minutes ago
        Once, I also couldn't fathom how people liked this one.

        When I asked, somebody said it fits more characters in terminals and code editors. This sounds incredibly obvious, but for whatever reason that was eye-opening for me and helped me appreciate it a lot more when I tried it again. Now I can't use anything else.

      • bayindirh 1 hour ago
        I drove a version of this for a fairly long time, remembering downloading it from GitHub page, not from the customizer. It's not a bad font by any means. I enjoyed Iosevka a lot while I used it.

        But, after using Berkeley Mono for three minutes, I switched to it everywhere in a week or so, and never looked back, or looked anywhere else, to be precise.

        Yes, it's not free, and yes it's opinionated. I can say that my opinions align with that font pretty much. It's one of the things which I cherish like an expensive hand tool which really does its job very well and makes you happy with its presence.

        [0]: https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono

        • psolidgold 33 minutes ago
          Here's an Iosevka config that mimics Berkeley Mono for those who don't want to or can't pay money for it. https://ahatem.github.io/IoskeleyMono/
          • bayindirh 29 minutes ago
            Wow. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, indeed.
        • astrolx 1 hour ago
          Funny enough I paid for Berkeley Mono but its italic is just not up to it (and particularly not to the price). Iosevka Mono has very nice glyphs but just way too narrow for my taste. JetBrains Mono, IBM Plex Mono (or Lilex) or Roboto Mono just seem to work much better for my tired eyes !
          • bayindirh 1 hour ago
            Fair enough. With super-compiler add-on, I believe you can adjust the angle of the italics.

            I faintly remember about the though process of italics, but I don't remember it now. They don't look uncomfortable to me, anyway.

        • cdaringe 1 hour ago
          wow i love it! 225 bucks for a font though is bonkers
          • psolidgold 36 minutes ago
            If you like Berkeley Mono but don't want to pay, here's an Iosevka configuration that attempts to mimic it as closely as possible. https://ahatem.github.io/IoskeleyMono/
          • bayindirh 1 hour ago
            I first bought it for $75, then the updates came. I also got them when they came out, but I don't remember the price.

            You can start with $75 package and work your way up if you feel like you need them.

      • nvme0n1p1 11 minutes ago
        The reason it's so popular is it was (one of?) the first fonts to include tons of programming ligatures. So it gained mindshare early, and since font choices are so personal, the more people use a font, the more people will like and post about it.
      • gorgoiler 30 minutes ago
        A huge helping of praise gets lumped onto Iosevka, from me, for the way it is defined in a custom S-expression DSL.

        https://github.com/be5invis/PatEL

        It’s a real hackers typeface.

      • para_parolu 1 hour ago
        Iosevka is very configurable and have many options for font and individual glyphs. Build supports text file config. At some point I made a config so I can always get preferred setup. It works well for me
      • 16bitvoid 1 hour ago
        I'm also not a fan of the narrow width, but there is an "extended" width version that's more like other mono fonts, which is what I personally use, albeit customized.
      • skrebbel 1 hour ago
        Give it a week
    • mcbuilder 3 hours ago
      Same, I went from being die hard Terminus fan to this. Been a long time daily driver.
      • durdn 1 hour ago
        oh man I used Terminus for so long till my finger hurt ... recently I was very happy with Cascadia Mono but now I've migrated to (as I was saying in another thread) Pragmasevka (derivative of Iosevka that mimics Pragmata Pro). It's really great.
      • ilvez 2 hours ago
        Yep. :waves: to ones on similar path.. Switching off from Terminus was hard, but eventually unavoidable. Switched to Jetbrains Mono when Ghostty came out nearly 2 years ago..
    • nextaccountic 6 hours ago
      > ttf (or better yet, ttc)

      Why is ttc better?

      • wartywhoa23 6 hours ago
        It's a package of ttfs, simpler to have all in one file on disk as well as install from one. Customization can generate a lot of font varieties.
    • brzz 3 hours ago
      Would be curious to see your custom version
    • JdeBP 6 hours ago
      That explains all of the .ptl source files, which I didn't recognize straightaway.
    • z0ltan 3 hours ago
      Testing whether I am shadow-banned. If you see this message, could you just acknowledge the same?
  • jve 5 hours ago
    Is it only me but I really dislike "Code Ligations"? I have to mark some chars to count how many consecutive "=" simbols there are... or \/ looking like V without having other chars near it to distinguish. Having to copy paste diamond shape to find out it is <>. arrows with squiggly tails, /> being ugly, <. having dot in the middle...

    That could be the maximum I'd like out of font to have "proper" greater/less-equal sign.

    • slazaro 5 hours ago
      They always seemed to me like solutions to a nonexistent problem. They make the code less readable, but ligatures exist and they seemed like a cool tech thing to implement, and they might look cool in screenshots. But in practice, in my opinion, they're worse than just having the normal characters. But I guess it's a matter of opinion, no harm in other people using them.
      • yayachiken 5 hours ago
        We have studies since ages ago that consistency in code style is one of the most important requirements for code quality.

        This goes down to the details like that you should either use spaces over tabs OR prescribe editor config such that the code looks similar on each machine.

        Of course this doesn't automatically mean that code ligatures are harmful, but I would be quite wary of using them. At the very least it introduces some friction, not sure if the arguably lower mental load of using real mathematical symbols instead of the ASCII symbols makes up for it.

        • jve 3 hours ago
          I'v been coding now for like 15 years and I'm not old enought to understand the debate between spaces vs tabs :)

          I guess my IDE choices never surface the issue for me... visually they just look the same. I cannot say which codebase uses spaces which uses tabs. I never even think about it. I just smash tab character and don't care that there have been spaces. Or enter or { and IDE does the indentation. I just choose not to press space 2-4-8-16 times in a row.

          Now I hope I won't get bulldozed over by HN crowd...

          • yayachiken 2 hours ago
            One of the main arguments for tabs over spaces was always that people wanted to configure how much space a level of indentation makes up on screen.

            With tabs pretty much every editor except something like notepad.exe could do it since ancient times, with spaces the editor needs to do a bit more processing, so you were a bit more restricted in editor choice, if you really were bothered so much by the indents chosen in the project.

            So it is actually quite similar to the ligature discussion. It would be good if the code looked the same for everybody but now instead of saying "But 8-space indents waste so much space on the screen :(" some people now go "But I don't like seeing things like != or -> instead of modern Unicode symbols :("

          • strenholme 2 hours ago
            Spaces vs. tabs causes a lot of issues for Python programmers who share their code with other programmers. The other place where spaces vs. tabs is an issue is with makefiles, probably one of the most annoying features of POSIX.
          • Sharlin 2 hours ago
            Well, the tabs vs spaces had been mostly resolved and spaces won. But obviously it was never about what physical keys to press, nobody on the spaces side would spam the space bar to indent stuff (except maybe in the unfortunate situations of having to use an editor with no choice of setting the tabulator to emit spaces, or a textfield in a non-editor UI where the tabulator cycles the focus instead).
            • godshatter 2 hours ago
              I'm still in the "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment" camp. If you adhere to it, it makes your code look nice on any tab size.
            • matltc 2 hours ago
              Typing formulas in Excel

              It's too bad spaces won, tabs is just correct I think, since one can configure the tabstop to use any indent size they would like. I'm quite tired of reading 2-space indent. Seems everything has moved this way now except python. I'm even seeing C with it, which is especially jarring. I think the languages that use braces for indentation particularly need 4. Python needs it least, and I can read Ruby because its blocks are delimited by words and it's bad style to write long methods

              • Sharlin 1 hour ago
                Agreed, four is optimal and has luckily been the standard in projects I’ve worked in. Encourages you to avoid deep nesting as well.
          • drob518 33 minutes ago
            Oh, for Pete’s sake. The bodies from this holy war are barely cool…
          • StableAlkyne 1 hour ago
            I'm in the same boat, I always just press tab and let my IDE or text editor fill in with N spaces.

            Granted, I'm also someone who heavily encourages the use of Black as the Python formatter in projects I'm on, specifically because it has no configurable options - can't have a holy war about formats if nothing can be changed.

          • chrisweekly 1 hour ago
            > "understand the debate between spaces vs tabs"

            The reason spaces won is that it's not (spaces) vs (tabs), it's (spaces) vs (tabs AND spaces).

      • smohare 4 hours ago
        [dead]
    • strenholme 2 hours ago
      I have used Fontforge to remove all ligatures from a programming font; e.g. my monospace font of choice is a aggressively subsetted variant of Fira Code with no ligatures whatsoever.

      https://github.com/samboy/CaulixtlaFonts/tree/main/MiscFonts...

    • graypegg 1 hour ago
      I personally like them because (to me) it makes a few symbols less ambiguous. (I use Victor Mono [0], so in my mind things like == and === in that font makes mistakes more obvious to me at least.)

      But also... I know I have the minority opinion on this. It absolutely should be opt-in, not opt-out. I think the past decade, I've been told the font tweaks I enable are incomprehensable to everyone I work with. The way I like my IDE fonts is far outside the bell curve (ligatures, cursive variants for some syntax, proportional variants for prose) so the fact that most new monospace code-focused fonts seem to align with my opinions should be concerning to font makers! I like that I don't have to patch a different font's italics into my code font anymore, but common sense says I SHOULD still have to do that!

      [0] https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono#ligatures

    • ragnese 4 hours ago
      I thought I was the only one! I figured I was either crazy or getting old and stuck in my ways. The first I'm I saw a font with them, I thought it was cool and tried it out. I almost immediately hated it. I've tried a few more times for varying lengths of time, and I've decided that I really do hate them.
    • Semaphor 5 hours ago
      Common complaint.

      Personally, I like them. They look pleasing and I never had issues distinguishing between the ligatures for ==, ===, and = itself.

    • bita_nidir 4 hours ago
      I logged into HN to upvote your comment. Code Ligations are an absolute abomination.
    • sicktriple 2 hours ago
      Ligatures suck. That's what Iosevka Fixed is for.
    • apetrovic 5 hours ago
      I like them and use them. But every editor I worked with has an option to disable ligatures.
      • voidUpdate 5 hours ago
        I wish editors had the option to disable certain ligatures. I use jetbrains mono, and the >> ligature breaks bracket highlighting in visual studio, making them both the same colour
    • semiquaver 5 hours ago
      ligatures, not ligations
      • Freak_NL 4 hours ago
        I have no idea why they chose 'ligation' instead of just ligature, but it was jarring every time I encountered it.
      • efilife 5 hours ago
        Interestingly, they are called ligations on the submitted website
        • swiftcoder 4 hours ago
          "ligation" is the verb-form (i.e. making something with/into ligatures).

          I'm not sure however that the verb form makes all that much sense in the context the website uses it...

          • masfuerte 4 hours ago
            English is great at exceptions, but I'm nearly sure anything ending in -ation is a noun. Ligation certainly is.

            Ligation is (among other things) the act of applying a ligature. So it does make sense.

            • swiftcoder 34 minutes ago
              Yes, technically it is a deverbal noun, but I couldn't put my finger on that term at the time
            • unfunco 1 hour ago
              Ration can be a verb.
    • kps 3 hours ago
      Yeah, Unicode shipped 35 years ago. If you want a ≠ then use a ≠.
      • rob74 2 hours ago
        Then you just need a programming language that accepts ≠ as a synonym of !=. But who knows, maybe there is already one?
        • daotoad 6 minutes ago
          Rakulang has you covered.

          It is aggressive in its unicode support. You want to use vulgar fractions? Or Mayan numerals? They'll work. You want to use mathematical notation like ∈? It works.

          You can literally do this:

          `my $var = ⅒ + 2 + Ⅻ;`

          https://docs.raku.org/language/unicode_ascii

        • cogburnd02 1 hour ago
          Or just pipe your source through a sed script that replaces one with the other before compiling/running.
          • drob518 31 minutes ago
            Yes, but why?
    • doodpants 58 minutes ago
      You and me both. Ligatures are a solution to a problem that monospaced fonts don't have. I don't mind if a mono font uses ligatures to harmonize character spacing/alignment a little bit. But I don't want things like a "proper" greater/less-equal sign; if a font goes so far as to replace >= with ≥, then it's lying to me about what characters are actually present in the file.
      • xondono 28 minutes ago
        They’re “lying” as much as any other character is “lying”.
    • mkesper 5 hours ago
      The 'fixed' variant disables them.
    • pmontra 3 hours ago
      It's not only you.
    • wildrhythms 5 hours ago
      I hate them. I disable them in every code editor. I don't need to have to guess if it's a double equals or a triple equals
      • throwuxiytayq 3 hours ago
        Some fonts use three lines to draw a triple equals ligature. That, and it is, well, triple long. I’ve never had any problems with distinguishing anything with ligatures. They’re nice to look at, and very easy to read once you’re used to them. Skill issue, guys.
        • doodpants 53 minutes ago
          The job of a font is to show me the text as it actually is. I shouldn't need to use a "skill" to decode what I'm looking at.
          • throwuxiytayq 42 minutes ago
            It is common knowledge among most - if not all - civilizations that you do, in fact, need to learn to read in order to know how to read.

            Anyway, since you want a direct representation of the text - presumably, you configured your editor to render EOL sequences explicitly, to distinguish tabs from spaces, etc?

      • lirolero 4 hours ago
        [dead]
    • boltzmann64 3 hours ago
      I used to hate font ligatures until I discovered Commit Mono (my all time favorite monospace font). They use the ligatures only to adjust spacing and make it look better on a monospace grid. No stupid <=, -> ligatures or anything else.
    • WesolyKubeczek 4 hours ago
      Code ligatures look like the final desperate attempt of an aging hipster, a Ruby on Rails and Web2.0 early adoptr (sic), the type to wear thick-rimmed fake glasses and a scarf in the middle of summer, to be cool, as he is riding his old Segway, with a glass of soy latte in one hand and an avocado toast in the other, into the void of oblivion.

      I don't like them because I never know what they actually stand for in ASCII.

  • oefrha 7 hours ago
    IMO a font specimen site may be the worst place to use font-display: swap. Was wondering why I was looking at what seemed indistinguishable from Courier, turns out what I saw was exactly Courier.
    • pimlottc 50 minutes ago
      I had thought that was an intentional animation to show the different weights and variants
    • embedding-shape 5 hours ago
      For those not in the know (or who didn't suffer through having to write CSS manually): font-display: swap changes the default behavior from "No text visible until font been loaded" to "Display fallback font until specified font is available", meaning you'll see Courier until Iosevka loaded properly, or Courier forever if the font file failed to load.

      I'm guessing the website author added that after some "website performance tool" recommended it, as they make sweeping generalizations that don't always make sense in every context, and "always add font-display: swap so text is readable earlier" is now a dogmatic rule "web developers" (mechanical or wetware ones) add without thinking, so that precious performance number goes up.

      • kqp 4 hours ago
        I think the dogmatism stems from Google, which delivers this advice as unconditional instruction and often gets parroted, makes the main website grading tool that calls it an error, and says they’ll drive less traffic to you if their grading tool rates you poorly.

        Also, I think also led by Google, `font-display: block;` actually behaves the same as swap now, just with a longer wait for the font to load [1]. Iosevka’s webpage does use swap, though.

        [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...

      • Freak_NL 4 hours ago
        I was wondering why it did that. This is really the kind of site where this is not a feature you should use.
      • Sharlin 3 hours ago
        Funny. Last I heard everyone wanted to specifically prevent the behavior of showing unstyled content before assets are loaded.
    • jrmg 3 hours ago
      On my iPad, I’m pretty sure Fira Code and IBM Plex in the example box are displaying as Courier. They’re certainly both identical.
    • dmtroyer 2 hours ago
      was also confused...
  • leduyquang753 5 minutes ago
    I fell in love with the narrow width of Iosevka which saved quite a bit of screen space for other things. Although there are always some people that loathe whenever I post screenshots of code using the font, "the m looks like a solid block of pixels" and the like.
  • twalla 59 minutes ago
    The default spacing is too narrow for my liking but what's really cool is in the amount of customization that's possible, including lookalikes of some popular paid programming fonts (I'm partial to Iosvmata).

    https://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono

    https://github.com/shytikov/pragmasevka

    https://github.com/N-R-K/Iosvmata

  • aleyan 54 minutes ago
    I have been using a union of Iosevka for most characters and Source Han Sans for CJK characters called Sarasa Gothic[0] for my roguelike (HexWalker)[1]. Iosevka's narrow characters are what originally inspired me to do it. Two Iosevka half-width glyphs literally form a square in the terminal, and if off-set by one characters, can be used to emulate a pointy-side up hexgrid in the terminal. In the end my love for the Iosevka letter shapes made me build HexWalker for the web, because it is easier to set custom fonts there than in the terminal.

    If you want to use Iosevka on your webpage there is a variant on google fonts called Iosevka Charon[2] that is really easy to use.

    Personally, I use filtered version of Iosevka that just contains the characters and variants I need for my personal website. For HexWalker I filter Sarasa Term to the characters I used, which takes it down to 42kb from 50mb+.

    [0] https://github.com/be5invis/sarasa-gothic

    [1] https://ytirnity.com/games/hexwalker

    [2] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Iosevka+Charon

  • meerita 3 minutes ago
    Got introduced to Iosevka through watching Tsoding. Really cool coding font.
  • needfish 5 hours ago
    I have a custom build of this font, use it everywhere now. One thing is that the width by default is too compact and the extended is too wide for my taste. Upon searching I found somebody's build that has width 576. I don't know why that number, but I used it in my current builds and it turns out pretty much perfect for terminal use for me, just wide enough.

    The hookiest tail for lowercase l man, love it.

    Even for my own website, with some tighter tracking and it can work okay as a text font.

    Another great customizable font is Maple Mono [0]

    [0] https://font.subf.dev/en/

    • frazer2669 4 hours ago
      Re: Width -- Same, default is too narrow and extended is too wide for my taste. The custom build has a default "semi-extended" which is just right for me and has a width of 548. Again no clue why that number, but if Iosevka says that is right then it is :) I do see that when I switch between semi-extended and a "regular" font like Cascadia Code that they seem to be the exact same width.
    • asa123 5 hours ago
      Sometimes I catch myself assuming hacker news is representative of the general population and then I read comments like these

      (I am excited to try this out)

  • iwixon 1 hour ago
    Emacs heads will know Prot. Mandatory shout out to his Iosevka customized version Aporetic [0], previously called 'Iosevka Comfy', which has become my daily driver.

    [0] https://github.com/protesilaos/aporetic

  • Daneel_ 3 hours ago
    I know it's a ridiculous thing to say, but the fact that I can customise the font so well on the website only to then not be able to download it like that is a crime. I don't want to muck about with npm just to build a font - do it on the site! /rant
  • GCUMstlyHarmls 6 hours ago
    First time I used Iosevka I felt really nauseated, kind of like getting motion sickness, it was a really bizarre experience for a font to give me. I was on a smaller screen though and getting some more characters in without getting tiny was actually a selling point, so I gave it another go and eventually got over the feeling.

    Now (after ... gosh, 6, 7, 8? years probably) I love it, use it everywhere and other monospace font feels super w i d e and weird.

  • TwoFerMaggie 7 hours ago
    Have been using it for a couple years. Before that I was using Fira Code/Mono which was also fantastic. However, once I got used to the condensed Iosevka, all the other fonts just felt loose and not space efficient enough in my IDE and terminal.
    • code-blooded 5 hours ago
      I am the opposite. I have CommitMono, Iosevka, Source Code Pro installed, but I always come back to Fira Code/Mono. At the same overall density of text, I find that I can skim through the text faster when the font is wider.

      It's interesting how personal font choice (among many other things) is!

    • aziis98 7 hours ago
      Exactly the same for me! I love it for the terminal especially
  • miqkt 6 hours ago
    My go-to monospace font in everything I use nowadays. Way back, it used to be JetBrains Mono. When I decided to give Iosevka a try, I actually started with the expanded variant, because I wasn't accustomed to the narrow jump. Took a while, but at some point I took that jump back to the default and it's stuck. Thanks for your efforts on this font Renzhi!
  • duxup 12 minutes ago
    On iOS, Firefox the text on the page overlaps in places.
  • durdn 4 hours ago
    A friend pointed me to a derivative of Iosevka that tries to mimic the historical (and commercially licensed) Pragmata Pro and the result is an insanely great font I've migrated to recently: https://github.com/shytikov/pragmasevka
  • jehnnysmith 17 minutes ago
    Beautiful font! Only problem is people are not writing code by hand anymore.
  • rbanffy 36 minutes ago
    11 years old. Congratulations!

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9951989

  • makizar 5 hours ago
    I’ve used Iosevka for years but recently switched to Commit Mono [0]. It hits all the right spots for me, is customizable, and does smart kerning which is neat.

    [0] https://commitmono.com/

    • tcdent 2 hours ago
      Hadn't seen this one yet, but that's exactly the type of sensibility I personally prefer in a monospace (Menlo has remained my daily driver for years).
  • botanical 1 hour ago
    I've been using Iosevka for more than 5 years now, it seems odd using anything else. The author is prolific and has made it really easy to build your own customised version. I don't think I'll ever move from using it.
    • blep-arsh 1 hour ago
      But have you tried Comic Sans Mono?
  • joarv0249nw 3 hours ago
    Why is it called sans-serif when there is serif on i j etc?
    • dcss_gardener 3 hours ago
      It's a descriptive label of the general lineage the designer considers their font to be in, not an ISO spec.

      A little bit of looseness here is a pretty strong signal for careful font design actually. It means the creator considered some other factor (in this case char disambiguation) to be more important than rigid adherence to the category.

  • ashton314 1 hour ago
    I really dislike how narrow it is. Fortunately that is customizable! This is my version that I’ve modeled off of Input Mono: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/iosevka-output
  • extr 23 minutes ago
    Truly the GOAT font. Nothing else compares.
  • edg5000 2 hours ago
    I've been using Droid Sans Mono for everything mono for a long time and can recommend it. But this font might be great too. Any Droid Sans Mono lovers out there?
    • kanbankaren 42 minutes ago
      Actually, I hate it. zero is not crossed, right?

      Fonts from Google have been bland and monotonous. The only nice font that Google released is Spectral(from France), but it is a proportional serif font.

  • remark5396 2 hours ago
    If you are looking for Iosevka with CJK characters, check out Sarasa Gothic.

    https://github.com/be5invis/sarasa-gothic

  • cik 6 hours ago
    I have been using this font for 3 years now. I can't, and won't get off it. I use it wherever I can - heck there's an Arch package! I'm pleasantly surprised by how much something this simple makes me happy. Legitimately a font has added to my life.
  • nitinreddy88 6 hours ago
    Once we use Berkeley mono font, we will never switch to another one :)

    Whenever font discussions come up, I will try everyones suggestions to find better than what I have, and always came back to Berkeley. Its almost near perfect for coding!

    • snthd 6 hours ago
      In that direction there's

      https://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono

      >Iosevka configuration to mimic the look and feel of Berkeley Mono as closely as possible.

      Discussed recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49161743

    • kstrauser 1 hour ago
      Berkeley Mono ruined everything else for me. It’s so, so good.
    • farlight 5 hours ago
      It has very poor character coverage, especially compared to Iosevka whose author speaks Mandarin as his main language (IIRC), and put a lot of effort into supporting as many languages as possible.
    • c-hendricks 1 hour ago
      Way too wide for me, plus as others mentioned you can get really close with Iosevka, but for free.
    • cyberpunk 2 hours ago
      I was looking forward to their new one (houston something?) for a couple years but seems all reference to it on their website has been removed.

      Shame.

    • andreypopp 6 hours ago
      You meant Pragmata Pro :)
      • cogburnd02 1 hour ago
        There's a lot to like about Pragmata Pro, but I'll never use a terminal font that isn't OFL.
      • BOOSTERHIDROGEN 2 hours ago
        why tho, berkeley mono ftw.
    • InfiniteQwert 2 hours ago
      I'm partial to Gintronic personally
    • amoshebb 6 hours ago
      There is an iosekeley remix that is nice as well for those who don’t want to splash out for Berkeley mono
    • bowsamic 6 hours ago
      I use Commit Mono, which is basically a free version of Berkeley Mono
  • thechairman12 32 minutes ago
    Why is this at the top of hackernews?
    • drob518 30 minutes ago
      Because it’s Hacker News.
  • nielsbot 59 minutes ago
    meta: if you are a heretic like me, use a proportional coding font. (in 2026 we can move past 80-column terminal style coding)

    for this, i like Input Sans a lot.

    https://input.djr.com/

  • mcookly 1 hour ago
    Although this may not apply to many, Iosevka is one of the few monospace fonts with excellent support for polytonic Greek.
  • Schlagbohrer 3 hours ago
    Their examples of their font made me fall in love with an alternative, IBM Plex, that they showed. IBM Plex shows more of their example assembly code than any of the other three, and quite clearly.
    • brzz 3 hours ago
      Yeah, IBM Plex Mono is near flawless imo
  • starquake 6 hours ago
    The default font since GNOME 48 is Adwaita Sans (a modified Inter with different l's and I's) and for monospace it is Adwaita Mono (a modified Iosevka.)

    I like it a lot!

  • est 2 hours ago
    For those not aware, Iosevka is the font that gives you perfec vertical alignment in monospace tables/flowcharts with CJK/emojis.
  • weinzierl 7 hours ago
    It also has many weights. In my opinion it's one of the best monospaced fonts where you actually can use weight as an additional dimension in syntax highlighting.
  • strenholme 2 hours ago
    It’s nice to see this font have a slab serif, because monospace serif fonts are quite rare (I don’t consider Courier a serif). The only other monospace serif font I can think of is Monaspace Xenon. [1]

    [1] There was also at one point a monospace variant of Bitstream Vera Serif called “Verily Serif”.

  • exceptione 5 hours ago
    Wish code editors would support different fonts per semantic region. Jetbrains, if you are reading this, implement this: <https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-29552/Allow-differ...>.

    The heading of Iosevka doesn't do the font right, my first thought was that this would be yet another soulless sans-serif. But it has tons of interesting variants. Hats of to Iosevka Etoile. See also <https://monaspace.githubnext.com> if you like big versatile font families.

  • octoberfranklin 17 minutes ago
    You can pry my PragmataPro license from my cold, dead hands.
  • LewisOrton 1 hour ago
    How did I not know this until today? it's so beautiful, thanks so much!
  • huqedato 1 hour ago
    Nice but I still prefer JuliaMono.
    • dTal 1 hour ago
      My personal favorite. Very underrated font, judging by this thread.
  • rf15 7 hours ago
    Good to know that the age old tradition of calling a font with serifs sans-serif is well alive and kicking.

    The reason here is that the basic glyph shape is that of a sans-serif, but still got serifs added afterwards. That doesn't stop it from diluting the meaning of the term.

    • wartywhoa23 6 hours ago
      Iosevka can perfectly be either sans-serif, or serif, or a mixture - it's customizable.
    • Freak_NL 4 hours ago
      Iosevka is more of a parfois-serif I guess.
    • farlight 5 hours ago
      Slab serif is optional.
    • xigoi 5 hours ago
      Where do you see the serifs?
      • rf15 5 hours ago
        ...In the submitted Title and on the page itself. It says it is a sans-serif font, but then offers also a slab-serif variant.
        • tremon 4 hours ago
          Where does it say it is a sans-serif font? The very first full sentence on the page starts with "Iosevka is an open-source, sans-serif + slab-serif, monospace + quasi‑proportional typeface family", just like the title here says "sans-serif and slab-serif".
  • climech 4 hours ago
    I remember falling in love with PragmataPro many years ago, I really like narrow fonts, but I couldn’t afford it (I don’t remember how much it was at the time but it was something insane, at least for my wallet). Then Iosevka entered the scene, and I never looked back. Really awesome project, especially the customization part.
    • tehno 3 hours ago
      Fabrizio has dropped the price by 40% typically on Black Friday sales. I missed that window and bough full price though, no regrets, it's one of the first customizations to go on a new OS install for me.
  • huffer 1 hour ago
    Kids, gather 'round, story time: my first computer when I was a kid was a communist hacky clone of a ZX Spectrum; and at one point I managed to install CP/M on it (I had no idea at the time what an OS was, I just intuit that it was a 'big deal'); and for whatever reason, this OS used a very tall and narrow font and I loved it sooo much that ever since then, I associate the tall narrow fonts with the halcyon time of excitement and exploration of those innocent days.

    I put Iosevka everywhere, not only in text editors but browsers and other desktop apps. It's one of the first things to do on a fresh machine. Thank you very much, @be5invis!

  • hobo123 2 hours ago
    Nice that it's specifically designed to be narrow columns, so you can fit more on screen. Will try this for coding.
  • JdeBP 6 hours ago
    It is interesting that it differentiates between oblique and italic, something that not many fonts aimed at the monospace crowd do, in both the English and Cyrillic alphabets. The list of variants for the letter k is longer than I expected.

    Alas, it is oblong, not square.

    And 7 thousand-odd code points is not as large a range as it used to be a couple of decades ago. That said, it does have MouseText, the 7-segment LED digits, and suchlike from the Supplementary Plane 1.

  • jwr 5 hours ago
    This is the best font I have ever found, and I have tried a lot of them over the years. The ability to specify your own variations and generate your own fonts is really useful. I am a big fan of the dotted zero, for example.

    The readability is excellent, and this font replaced everything else that I tried before. Highly recommended!

  • __mharrison__ 2 hours ago
    Have been using this in my terminal, editors, and books for a few years.

    Lovely font.

  • fenprace 6 hours ago
    I ve been using iosevka for 5+ years. Iosevka Extended is my go-t mono font. It's just clean and cool.

    One thing I definitely love is it's easy to access. It has been packed for many package managers. I can just brew install or yay -S to get it.

  • beeforpork 5 hours ago
    Is there a PDF specimen? I disable font substitution in my browser, but I do want to have a peek. But not a peek that requires reconfiguring my browser.
  • allumik 6 hours ago
    Used Iosevka for a while, now fully on Aporetic for everything monospace. Something about the thin and tall serif just clicks with me, and Aporetic seemed to work better size wise for my terminals and GUIs.
    • wartywhoa23 6 hours ago
      That's still Iosevka though, just a custom build.
  • amelius 3 hours ago
    Great font! Requires some getting-used-to but saves a lot of screen space!
  • matltc 1 hour ago
    InconsolataGo is all that is needed
  • chiefwilsion 2 hours ago
    the font never worked right for me. the variants were not recognized in vscode
  • 7e 2 hours ago
    Buy the original PragmataPro and support original creators. The rest are ripoffs, plain and simpls, copied by leeches.
    • elric 1 hour ago
      Can you elaborate? Are you saying iosevka is a PragmataPro ripoff?
      • cflewis 27 minutes ago
        Yes, because it is.

        Support independent devs and designers. Pay the money.

        • elric 5 minutes ago
          So can you elaborate instead of just repeating what the other commenter said?
  • gadrev 6 hours ago
    Nice one. I used it for some years, mostly in urxvt.

    Some time ago I switched to wayland/sway/foot, and I'm on 0xProtoNerdFont, quite pleasant as well.

  • kbesplv 37 minutes ago
    looks amazing
  • InfiniteQwert 3 hours ago
    I know it’s not all that common, but I still really like Gintronic
  • jbverschoor 3 hours ago
    Victor Mono still the best for dense terminals
  • Frone125 1 hour ago
    Really awesome. Glad it is being open sourced
  • expelwide 2 hours ago
    I prefer Pragmasevka
  • voidUpdate 5 hours ago
    > "glyphs are exactly 1/2em wide"

    The M is 1/2 of an M wide?

    • einpoklum 5 hours ago
      Yes. That is, for a given x-height, the width of an 'M' half of what it "should" be for that x-height. According to this:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Em_(typography)

      it seems the width of an M should be exactly equal to the x-height in points (IIUC).

      • voidUpdate 5 hours ago
        > However, as a very rough guideline, an "average" font might have [...] an x-height of 48% of the em
  • phplovesong 1 hour ago
    Was a user, its a really nice font. Then i found Berkeley Mono, that has been the daily deiver for the past 5-6 years.
  • sho_hn 6 hours ago
    Iosevka Fixed Curly is also my favorite font to code and terminal in.
  • exwireXI 6 hours ago
    I've been using Iosevka(custom) and loved it since then.
  • sgarrity 5 hours ago
    What does “quasi-proportional” mean?
    • jaffa2 4 hours ago
      I had this question. Then I read the bit of the page with the sentence that starts ‘The quasi-proportional families:’
  • neutronenkind 2 hours ago
    oh thats a good one!
  • einpoklum 5 hours ago
    What does it mean for a font (or typeface) to be "quasi‑proportional"?

    Also, whoever said that fonts intended for a terminal need to be narrower? Some terminals have narrower chars, some wider. And terminal emulators often allow for multiple char aspect ratios - e.g. via bitmap fonts of different aspect ratio.

    Anyway, the typeface looks interesting, but I would have liked for the creators to compare and contrast it with existing (and popular) monospace / terminal-oriented typefaces.

    • Freak_NL 4 hours ago
      Scroll down to where they do that under Spatial Efficient.
  • bowsamic 6 hours ago
    I felt like my eyes hurt when I tried this font. It's hard for me to switch away from the standard width monospace fonts. At the moment I use Commit Mono. Extra horizontal space might be nice but it's not worth risking any discomfort
  • orphereus 7 hours ago
    Does tsoding use this font?
  • IceDane 7 hours ago
    I occasionally try to find a nicer font than Iosevka, but none of them stick and I always go back.
  • HackerThemAll 4 hours ago
    Half a gig for a single variant of this font? No, thank you. That just doesn't make any sense. Perform some minification and/or publish just TTF or OTF.
    • TaLiTr 2 hours ago
      Maybe read again? The font variants are 50 MB, not 500. That seems like an average size for a font with such broad language support.
    • c-hendricks 1 hour ago
      My build is about 16mb.
  • dizhn 6 hours ago
    It's a google score thing right. That the first font that loads is not their font on a font page?
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