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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 :("
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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
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?
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.
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.
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).
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”.
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.
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.
As we are using hypertext, I thought it would be useful to throw a link in here... but following your instructions feels like navigating a paper map. I don't see LICENSE.md here: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/releases
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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".
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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
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
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.
Same, I went from being die hard Terminus fan to this. Been a long time daily driver.
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..
> ttf (or better yet, ttc)
Why is ttc better?
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.
Would be curious to see your custom version
Here you go:
https://pastebin.com/WwYY0QqX
Copy and paste into Import Configuration at https://typeof.net/Iosevka/customizer to preview.
That explains all of the .ptl source files, which I didn't recognize straightaway.
Testing whether I am shadow-banned. If you see this message, could you just acknowledge the same?
I see you, my friend!
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 :("
> "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).
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.
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.
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).
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
Agreed, four is optimal and has luckily been the standard in projects I’ve worked in. Encourages you to avoid deep nesting as well.
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.
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...
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.
I logged into HN to upvote your comment. Code Ligations are an absolute abomination.
Common complaint.
Personally, I like them. They look pleasing and I never had issues distinguishing between the ligatures for ==, ===, and = itself.
Ligatures suck. That's what Iosevka Fixed is for.
Yeah, Unicode shipped 35 years ago. If you want a ≠ then use a ≠.
Then you just need a programming language that accepts ≠ as a synonym of !=. But who knows, maybe there is already one?
Or just pipe your source through a sed script that replaces one with the other before compiling/running.
I like them and use them. But every editor I worked with has an option to disable ligatures.
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
ligatures, not ligations
I have no idea why they chose 'ligation' instead of just ligature, but it was jarring every time I encountered it.
Interestingly, they are called ligations on the submitted website
"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...
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.
Ration can be a verb.
It's not only you.
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.
The 'fixed' variant disables them.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
I was wondering why it did that. This is really the kind of site where this is not a feature you should use.
Funny. Last I heard everyone wanted to specifically prevent the behavior of showing unstyled content before assets are loaded.
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.
was also confused...
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.
But have you tried Comic Sans Mono?
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
Well, I was able to do it fairly simply online via github actions with the help of chatgpt.
Chat history (excuse the lazily-constructed prompt): https://chatgpt.com/share/6acf829b-5428-83ec-939c-acbc7805a3...
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/
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.
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)
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.
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.
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!
Exactly the same for me! I love it for the terminal especially
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!
Nice but I still prefer JuliaMono.
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
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?
Why is it called sans-serif when there is serif on i j etc?
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.
If you are looking for Iosevka with CJK characters, check out Sarasa Gothic.
https://github.com/be5invis/sarasa-gothic
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.
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/
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).
For those not aware, Iosevka is the font that gives you perfec vertical alignment in monospace tables/flowcharts with CJK/emojis.
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”.
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.
Yeah, IBM Plex Mono is near flawless imo
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.
Thanks, I couldn’t spot a license on the website, but existence of an arch package does probably mean the license is okayish.
Go and read the source code on the GitHub repository that the page links to as "Downloads". There's a LICENSE.md there, and a fair amount besides.
As we are using hypertext, I thought it would be useful to throw a link in here... but following your instructions feels like navigating a paper map. I don't see LICENSE.md here: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/releases
But alright, I realized you must download the archive to find LICENSE.md in there: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/archive/refs/tags/v34.9....
The license is "SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1." from http://scripts.sil.org/OFL
or drop the releases and go to just https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka where LICENSE.md file shows up.
Nice that it's specifically designed to be narrow columns, so you can fit more on screen. Will try this for coding.
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!
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.
InconsolataGo is all that is needed
Really awesome. Glad it is being open sourced
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.
Have been using this in my terminal, editors, and books for a few years.
Lovely font.
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.
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.
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!
Berkeley Mono ruined everything else for me. It’s so, so good.
Way too wide for me, plus as others mentioned you can get really close with Iosevka, but for free.
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
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.
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.
I'm partial to Gintronic personally
You meant Pragmata Pro :)
There's a lot to like about Pragmata Pro, but I'll never use a terminal font that isn't OFL.
why tho, berkeley mono ftw.
There is an iosekeley remix that is nice as well for those who don’t want to splash out for Berkeley mono
I use Commit Mono, which is basically a free version of Berkeley Mono
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.
Iosevka can perfectly be either sans-serif, or serif, or a mixture - it's customizable.
Iosevka is more of a parfois-serif I guess.
Slab serif is optional.
Where do you see the serifs?
...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.
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".
the font never worked right for me. the variants were not recognized in vscode
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.
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!
Great font! Requires some getting-used-to but saves a lot of screen space!
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.
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.
Same here. There are several pictures on the github page:
https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka
Buy the original PragmataPro and support original creators. The rest are ripoffs, plain and simpls, copied by leeches.
Can you elaborate? Are you saying iosevka is a PragmataPro ripoff?
I prefer Pragmasevka
Victor Mono still the best for dense terminals
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.
That's still Iosevka though, just a custom build.
I know it’s not all that common, but I still really like Gintronic
oh thats a good one!
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.
> "glyphs are exactly 1/2em wide"
The M is 1/2 of an M wide?
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).
> However, as a very rough guideline, an "average" font might have [...] an x-height of 48% of the em
Iosevka Fixed Curly is also my favorite font to code and terminal in.
I've been using Iosevka(custom) and loved it since then.
What does “quasi-proportional” mean?
I had this question. Then I read the bit of the page with the sentence that starts ‘The quasi-proportional families:’
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.
Scroll down to where they do that under Spatial Efficient.
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
Does tsoding use this font?
Victor Mono, I believe.
I believe so.
yes
I occasionally try to find a nicer font than Iosevka, but none of them stick and I always go back.
Pragmata Pro. The font Iosevka is based on.
Interesting cycle, someone making Iosevka more pragmatapro like here: https://github.com/shytikov/pragmasevka
I've replaced Iosevka with Nokia Sans on KDE and earlier Xfce
input.djr.com, haven't used a different font in many years!
What about Maple Mono?
love Maple Mono!
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.
My build is about 16mb.
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.
It's a google score thing right. That the first font that loads is not their font on a font page?