I can only really judge a font when its loaded in my system, running in my setup. I wish font makers targeting developers would release trial fonts (with some essential chars missing or similar), so that we could test them properly before paying.
I am always looking for a better font, and this one looks like it may be an improvement over my current one.
My thoughts exactly. Berkeley Mono looks great on the website and in the PDF data sheet, but the real test is how does it look in my terminal and editor, especially when compared side-by-side with my current preferred font (Pragmata Pro; also commercial but well worth it!)
I purchased Berkeley Mono to give it a shot. While I found it visually appealing, it still cannot compete in the terminal against Pragmata Pro due to how narrow Pragmata Pro is. I can fit so much more on my screen yet still have it be clean and legible with Pragmata Pro.
Thanks and good feedback, beta testing was done in a similar way - font cut with a few missing glyphs and was limited to ASCII-basic set. I'll see if I can extend this more generally.
One idea to consider... offer the font but with the vowels jumbled around and the digits jumbled around. I can see everything I need. But would need to buy it if I really want to use it.
Yes please - in my case because fonts look different on Windows and Mac (and Linux?) and I've been caught a few times after buying fonts that looked great only to discover all screenshots were from Macs and on Windows it was nothing like it.
I'd second the vote for some "testing" fonts. At the very least, could you include some screenshots of larger chunks of code, with {} etc? I can't really tell how this will look on a screen full of code.
MonoLisa has a playground where you can paste code snippets and try the font - that might be a good approach for other fonts aimed at developers. https://www.monolisa.dev/playground
MonoLisa also has a trial version. [1] They have a great site, I love the font, and the availability of a free trial was the icing on the cake. Great experience all around.
Looks nice in principle, but being suitable for the actual daily use (for coding) will depend on how it renders in a specific IDE at a specific size on a specific OS. There's LOTS of mono fonts that look great in larger sizes or on Macs, but that all but unbearable to look at in smaller sizes on Windows.
There's no mention of this font having a manually hinted TTF version, which is pretty much required for rendering under these conditions. This gives me a very big pause. As others have said - at $75 a pop this font absolutely needs a downloadable, installable and usable trial. How it looks in PDF and rendered to a bitmap may showcase its design well, but not its real-world usage. That's assuming that the author means to position it also as a coding font (which seems to be the case judging by the samples).
TTF hinting is automatic, using vertical and horizontal stem widths. Manual hinting is WIP. I've gotten feedback for trial fonts, please sign up for notifications at the bottom of the page and we'll email you when that's properly available. It requires some font engineering and writing up a license for it.
You know those pictures where it says "the longer you look the worse it gets" - this is the opposite of that. The longer I look at this site, the more I love it.
Yes, done by hand, a lot of elbow grease. Same with the animation which took an insane amount of time (700 frames). Shout out to MonoDraw (Berkeley Mono works wonderfully with it): https://monodraw.helftone.com/
Given the file name “Artboard-2” my guess is that it’s done in Adobe Illustrator, but you can do that in any graphics editing tool like Photoshop, Figma, Sketch, etc.
For typographic work, I recommend a vector-based tool because it scales to any resolution.
I rarely get excited by fonts, but I'm loving this one. I only recently realized how long machine readable fonts have been around while working on a reproduction of the Apollo 11 flight plan. I love how this one has some of their flavor while still being easy on the eyes.
The licensing is unclear/vague/contradictory... I'm totally confused what the 'developer' license actually means when it says you can use it for "personal use in professional context, but not commercial." And how is a subscription for a print product handled? Do I have to burn my printed materials if I don't renew a subscription?
Font vendors seem to _love_ coming up with weird snowflake licensing schemes rather than trying to stick with something well understood.
I actually wanted to make it simpler. Separating professional use (this is how Input Mono font does it) and commercial use allows developers to use fonts for their daily work, but the machine belongs to their employer and the work they do is for their employer; while also being able to provide a separate Commercial license for companies and businesses.
There are no page view limits for websites (no trackers), installation limits , epub/ebook limits, etc. Basically it is along the lines of FontSpring's worry free license and I think its even better.
Thanks, that's what I thought it was _trying_ to say, but I'm not sure that's what it actually _does_ say.
You might look at the jetbrains individual license for some language that I think is more clear and objective: A personal license must be paid for by a single named individual, not paid or reimbursed by a company, and is not re-assignable, while the organizational license is more a "floating seat" that can be paid by a company and assigned to individual employees as needed. That helps sidestep the mess of trying to define what is "professional but not commercial."
Also, under a subscription model I'd want some assurance that previously created print materials receive a perpetual license even if I didn't renew and that I wouldn't have to try to excise it from everywhere I've used it in the past if the license ever lapsed.
Does this mean that if I am a one-man-freelancing-shop I need a commercial license rather than a developer license?
As a follow up: If I work for SuperMegaCorp as a W-2 employee, I obviously qualify for a developer license, but as a 1099 contractor? And if I send a PDF invoice that uses this font - is that professional or commercial usage? Clearly, I am not a lawyer ;)
I like the font. I'd pay $75 for a license if it works for editing code.
The problem is that it typically takes a week or so of use to determine if it would work for me. I'm not going to pay $75 for something that I won't know if I have any use for.
Very effective presentation. It looks fantastic. Will be good value at $75 for some people but not for me with so many other great mono fonts available (many with code ligatures). Probably better for designers than coders. With small fonts for everyday I don't see any big difference in readibilty beyond something like Fira Code unles you are very particular. Beyond that it is mostly taste (or lack of) but then I currently use Comic Code Ligature so I am clearly crazy.
I very much welcome the new wave of mono fonts being developed recently. As a visually impaired person who has issues differentiating fonts on different backgrounds, the variety of fonts is very important as it allows me to find the optimal font for the environment and color contrast. Mono variety used to be limited but I can see a renaissance now!
I am personally not a fan of ligatures, but since they seem to be entirely optional and controlled by the IDE, I think it would be nice to see them included. For people not like me, because it won't hurt me, and will broaden the appeal.
I like the typeface but I think it would be helpful to have a way for someone to copy and paste their code as a preview but I think that if you allowed that then others could download your font for free. You might want to mention that it costs $75 above the fold and I would think that you would want also to center the column of the site itself (these are nitpicks though).
One option to allow users to preview the font while not letting them download it for free is to have them submit their code sample, render an image of it on the server, then send that back to the user. Not as nice as rendering the font in browser, of course, but it works.
I was thinking that but others also mentioned to have a trial mode font that didn’t have a complete character set also. Rendering a picture might become costly.
I am impressed by how quickly the page loaded, looked at the source code and what do you know? No modern UI library being used, semantic class names and not a lot of code being loaded. I'm impressed by the simplicity!
I really like the font, but I doubt that a claim of “wide language support” can be made when Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and other scripts are not supported.
ISO 8859-1 Latin-1 Western European
ISO 8859-2 Latin-2 Central European
ISO 8859-3 Latin-3 South European
ISO 8859-4 Latin-4 North European
ISO 8859-9 Latin-5 Turkish
ISO 8859-10 Latin-6 Nordic
ISO 8859-13 Latin-7 Baltic Rim
ISO 8859-15 Latin-9 Finnish, Estonian
ISO 8859-16 Latin-10 South-Eastern European
I do not have any problems paying for something that I will use several hours every day. But would like to try the font in my editor before purchasing.
Could have a demo download that only contains the most common letters like A-z0-9 and the brackets etc ([{:,.-_|&! Sure many will use the "demo" forever, but those people might be future customers and mouth-to-mouth marketers
I know I'm the niche of the niche, but many fonts I tried, have problems rendering Turkish characters e.g "ş" "ı" "ğ" "ü", does the font support these, if yes, could we get a screenshot with iTerm2 if possible? :)
These are good fonts but it’s unclear why it’s not released under a proper font license like SIL Open Font License. This would make the use of the fonts much easier.
I wish the page had more examples at, say, the 10pt size which is more comparable to what I am using in my editor. The huge copy in the examples look beautiful but they hardly map to real world usage so not entirely helpful...
+1000. It would also be useful to see it rendered at small sizes on different OS's -- macOS and Windows and some X environments -- because the font renderers on different platforms produce different visual results and the differences are often more visible at smaller sizes.
I think this is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Of course the creators should get paid, its a lifetime license, I'm going to forgo some of my usual BS purchases and get it.
As a dev who constantly switches out fonts / themes & also pays for them, a few things to note:
- I mainly test for clarity, how HD something is on my IDE from 12 to 16px. I paid for Monolisa (which I like a lot) but other open source fonts actually have higher fidelity(Luculent, Fairfax HD, Hermit, Agave) - this gives me pause on purchase of license.
- No ligatures isn’t a deal breaker, but many open source fonts have them Day 1 & are implementing them well. My work place has lambdas & operators all over code base - some fonts make it easier to parse around.
- Price is not bad overall, as I feel paid fonts are Quality of Life coder tools, like mechanical keyboards (pro surfers don’t use surfboards from Walmart).
- Summary is that I’m on the verge to take the plunge but really need a day or 2 in the trenches with it to see how I flow with it. Trial version should exist like others say. Similarities to JetBrains Mono are there even if unintentionally so.
- I support indie mono fonts, keep iterating!
i actually really like the font, but I'm super turned off by the copy. i feel like this kind of writing belongs on a wine bottle or in a calvin klein catalog. to each their own, i suppose.
I enquired and I was told in no uncertain terms that the license forbids patching. This means that you cannot use the popular Nerd Fonts [1] patch set for adding missing glyphs. I hope that will change as I would like to use this typeface.
That's quite disappointing. As a Neovim user, I depend on nerd fonts for icons.
Does the license forbid patching even for personal use? Or is it only forbidden to re-distribute the patched font, by using it on a website for example?
Love this, but I find the yearly / per-seat pricing for commercial use very hostile. Nobody wants to be chasing bills for a single typeface in their project. A one-off charge somewhere between $300-$999 would be much more attractive, buy-and-forget.
You could support Hungarian with only two additional letters.
I find the subscription license for commercial use a bit problematic. Say I have an app and I want to use the font. That’s “commercial” as long as it’s not “personal” AFAICT… and if I stop paying your fee some day then technically the app has to be modified or taken down.
This might not be a problem, but it’s not really “no strings attached.” There should be a fixed-fee perpetual commercial license as well.
Best of luck with it, I’m sure it’s hard to compete with all the free developer fonts!
If you look at the Burgevouns comparison Berkley mono is the least good. It's compared to non-mono fonts which, naturally, have better kerning. Having three different representations of the number 0 including one that is indistinguishable from upper case o makes this a no-no for coding from my point of view. It's one of the first things I look for and why I love Hack.
We offer downloads of pre-configured stylistic sets (variations). All you need to do is download the specific version and install it. In applications such as Adobe Illustrator, you can select the variant using Open Type features: https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/special-characters...
Nope, you didn't miss anything. The license is $75 for the developer package, you use it unlimited times, anywhere you want (except commercial use) and you get unlimited updates.
I was excited for it, but I cannot justify the price.
I may however consider the $25/year for commercial use if I ever want to use it.
Why the alternative version of "7"? The alternative zeroes are useful because zero looks like capital O, but with what would I confuse a "7"? Or is it there for another reason?
7 is similar to the italic 1, I guess.
but also, the hand written version of 7 was taught to us, in Hungary, in the 1980s, with a small horizontal cross-line on the slanted stem of the 7.
we quickly abandoned that small detail when writing, because we never saw that on printed material, though in writing 1 & 7 can be similar
Oh my word just installed these- They look absolutely dope. If anything it looks better in my actual terminal than on the website. very happy to pay for such great design.
Also the checkout flow on the website was super-slick. Nice job all round.
But I’m glad you asked. Learn about how font characters are structured[0]. Then zoom in, inspect and compare the details of a few characters from both fonts. This will help you understand how they’re different.
At a risk of sounding unfriendly, the best way I know is to look at them side by side.
They are different fonts.
A lot of good looking mono fonts look very similar and there is a reason for that. As designers fine tune features for better legibility (main concern with terminal typeface) fonts converge to look roughly the same. But they still have different feel when you get a lot of text on a screen.
A very distinctive feature of Berkeley Mono seems to be the squared-circle used in the rounded characters, where Roboto has very circular characters. I'm sure there a lot more differences if I saw them side-by-side, but that's the most obvious one for this font snob.
> Berkeley Mono wears a UNIX T-shirt and aspires to be etched on control panels in black synthetic lacquer. It is Adrian Frutiger visits Bell Labs. It is Gene Kranz's command. It operates with calibrated precision and has a datasheet.
It costs $75 for an individual license, not really in the spirit of UNIX
I wasn’t there, but I’ve heard that the AT&T-initiated compiler “debundling” was the thing that kick-started the popularity of the GNU userland, with GCC acting as the gateway drug. So not only are these facts related, they are apparently even causally so.
UNIX was an internal and then commercial product of ATT bell labs (and later Novell). You're misconstruing it with the FOSS movement.
UNIX was created for ATT to sell more telephone service, and then later sold and licensed to other companies to likewise improve their internal computer usage. UNIX was not created to be zero cost. Apparently a commercial license for UNIX cost $20k at the time (or $150 for universities/educational institutions).
edit: IMHO $75 one time is a fair price for a premium font. Designers regularly pay $300 or more for typefaces they use in their work. There are monthly subscriptions to font foundries that cost more too.
The historical origin that I learned for UNIX was that it was created mostly out of frustration with Multics, and that its original "primary" use was running one of Ken Thompson's video games[1]. It was originally written for a PDP-7, which was already obsolete at the time and probably wasn't a target for telecommunications software.
It was only much later (and after significant arm twisting for more computing resources) that AT&T took UNIX seriously. Even then, the first marketed versions of UNIX were oriented towards programmers and technical editors, not telecommunication[2].
It was certainly not created to sell more telephone service. It was a research project that found applications to run on it, most of which had little if anything to do with telephone service at first. Much later UNIX was adapted to run telephone network equipment.
> It costs $75 for an individual license, not really in the spirit of UNIX
Eh, I think it’s a fair price, a. And b, pretty apt when you consider most Unixes were priced per core. BSD/OS itself was $1000 back in the day, according to my research, which was cheaper than System V, but obviously still expensive.
Linux was created for a reason.
And here I’ll refrain from making a snarky remark about how someone should make a similar font that is lower quality but will be way more popular.
Yeah, every time a typeface is shared on here it is met with some opposition since most cost money for individuals/personal use. I understand it's hard to take the time to design a nice typeface and that the creators should be compensated for their work, but sadly it means fonts like these are practically limited to commercial use. I wonder if there's a better way to turn a profit on typefaces - there's been a handful of really interesting ones posted on HN I've wanted to try.
There is a ton of entitlement nowadays, that's for sure.
One should be grateful to those who do release their hard work to the public domain or under a FOSS license, rather than being resentful toward those who don't.
People absolutely deserve to be compensated for their work, if they so choose, and they are absolutely permitted to release their work under any license they want.
You might be interested in futurefonts.xyz. Kind of like Kickstarter for fonts. You pay for typefaces in development. Price goes up as more features and components get added but you get everything that’s included when you buy it and then everything that’s added afterward for no additional cost.
I can only really judge a font when its loaded in my system, running in my setup. I wish font makers targeting developers would release trial fonts (with some essential chars missing or similar), so that we could test them properly before paying.
I am always looking for a better font, and this one looks like it may be an improvement over my current one.
My thoughts exactly. Berkeley Mono looks great on the website and in the PDF data sheet, but the real test is how does it look in my terminal and editor, especially when compared side-by-side with my current preferred font (Pragmata Pro; also commercial but well worth it!)
I purchased Berkeley Mono to give it a shot. While I found it visually appealing, it still cannot compete in the terminal against Pragmata Pro due to how narrow Pragmata Pro is. I can fit so much more on my screen yet still have it be clean and legible with Pragmata Pro.
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Thanks and good feedback, beta testing was done in a similar way - font cut with a few missing glyphs and was limited to ASCII-basic set. I'll see if I can extend this more generally.
One idea to consider... offer the font but with the vowels jumbled around and the digits jumbled around. I can see everything I need. But would need to buy it if I really want to use it.
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Yes please - in my case because fonts look different on Windows and Mac (and Linux?) and I've been caught a few times after buying fonts that looked great only to discover all screenshots were from Macs and on Windows it was nothing like it.
I'd second the vote for some "testing" fonts. At the very least, could you include some screenshots of larger chunks of code, with {} etc? I can't really tell how this will look on a screen full of code.
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MonoLisa has a playground where you can paste code snippets and try the font - that might be a good approach for other fonts aimed at developers. https://www.monolisa.dev/playground
[I am not affiliated with MonoLisa]
MonoLisa also has a trial version. [1] They have a great site, I love the font, and the availability of a free trial was the icing on the cake. Great experience all around.
https://www.monolisa.dev/buy/661578
Looks nice in principle, but being suitable for the actual daily use (for coding) will depend on how it renders in a specific IDE at a specific size on a specific OS. There's LOTS of mono fonts that look great in larger sizes or on Macs, but that all but unbearable to look at in smaller sizes on Windows.
There's no mention of this font having a manually hinted TTF version, which is pretty much required for rendering under these conditions. This gives me a very big pause. As others have said - at $75 a pop this font absolutely needs a downloadable, installable and usable trial. How it looks in PDF and rendered to a bitmap may showcase its design well, but not its real-world usage. That's assuming that the author means to position it also as a coding font (which seems to be the case judging by the samples).
TTF hinting is automatic, using vertical and horizontal stem widths. Manual hinting is WIP. I've gotten feedback for trial fonts, please sign up for notifications at the bottom of the page and we'll email you when that's properly available. It requires some font engineering and writing up a license for it.
Do you have any screenshots with emacs or vim on Linux, and maybe a terminal?
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What a great marketing page. I loved the animation!
I’m also a big fan of the design of the author’s website: https://neil.computer/
Wholly agreed in regards to the author's website, it's absolutely fantastic!
You know those pictures where it says "the longer you look the worse it gets" - this is the opposite of that. The longer I look at this site, the more I love it.
It's not unlike scrolling through a social media feed, with the short segments, boxes, and animations.
This may be a dumb question, but how do you make a document like that fake patient chart in this demo? [1]
Is there an editor that can do things like this? Or is it all laid out by hand?
[1] https://neil.computer/notes/berkeley-mono-february-update/
Yes, done by hand, a lot of elbow grease. Same with the animation which took an insane amount of time (700 frames). Shout out to MonoDraw (Berkeley Mono works wonderfully with it): https://monodraw.helftone.com/
Ah, thank you for the response! I'm quite impressed, seeing that example nearly made me impulse buy the font.
It’s likely laid out by hand.
Given the file name “Artboard-2” my guess is that it’s done in Adobe Illustrator, but you can do that in any graphics editing tool like Photoshop, Figma, Sketch, etc.
For typographic work, I recommend a vector-based tool because it scales to any resolution.
Not saying this is what they used for this demo, but Crystal Reports is commonly used in the medical industry for print/reporting like that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Reports#/media/File:SA...
(if that is what you were asking)
I rarely get excited by fonts, but I'm loving this one. I only recently realized how long machine readable fonts have been around while working on a reproduction of the Apollo 11 flight plan. I love how this one has some of their flavor while still being easy on the eyes.
I feel the same. Very nice font!
The licensing is unclear/vague/contradictory... I'm totally confused what the 'developer' license actually means when it says you can use it for "personal use in professional context, but not commercial." And how is a subscription for a print product handled? Do I have to burn my printed materials if I don't renew a subscription?
Font vendors seem to _love_ coming up with weird snowflake licensing schemes rather than trying to stick with something well understood.
I actually wanted to make it simpler. Separating professional use (this is how Input Mono font does it) and commercial use allows developers to use fonts for their daily work, but the machine belongs to their employer and the work they do is for their employer; while also being able to provide a separate Commercial license for companies and businesses.
There are no page view limits for websites (no trackers), installation limits , epub/ebook limits, etc. Basically it is along the lines of FontSpring's worry free license and I think its even better.
Thanks, that's what I thought it was _trying_ to say, but I'm not sure that's what it actually _does_ say.
You might look at the jetbrains individual license for some language that I think is more clear and objective: A personal license must be paid for by a single named individual, not paid or reimbursed by a company, and is not re-assignable, while the organizational license is more a "floating seat" that can be paid by a company and assigned to individual employees as needed. That helps sidestep the mess of trying to define what is "professional but not commercial."
Also, under a subscription model I'd want some assurance that previously created print materials receive a perpetual license even if I didn't renew and that I wouldn't have to try to excise it from everywhere I've used it in the past if the license ever lapsed.
Does this mean that if I am a one-man-freelancing-shop I need a commercial license rather than a developer license?
As a follow up: If I work for SuperMegaCorp as a W-2 employee, I obviously qualify for a developer license, but as a 1099 contractor? And if I send a PDF invoice that uses this font - is that professional or commercial usage? Clearly, I am not a lawyer ;)
Very nice font, BTW.
This left me more confused - there are two cases :
- the typeface is used in media, or otherwise distributed
- the typeface is used locally in some app
Which license supports which case?
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I like the font. I'd pay $75 for a license if it works for editing code.
The problem is that it typically takes a week or so of use to determine if it would work for me. I'm not going to pay $75 for something that I won't know if I have any use for.
Very effective presentation. It looks fantastic. Will be good value at $75 for some people but not for me with so many other great mono fonts available (many with code ligatures). Probably better for designers than coders. With small fonts for everyday I don't see any big difference in readibilty beyond something like Fira Code unles you are very particular. Beyond that it is mostly taste (or lack of) but then I currently use Comic Code Ligature so I am clearly crazy.
I very much welcome the new wave of mono fonts being developed recently. As a visually impaired person who has issues differentiating fonts on different backgrounds, the variety of fonts is very important as it allows me to find the optimal font for the environment and color contrast. Mono variety used to be limited but I can see a renaissance now!
I would love to see ligatures incorporated but I understand that is a polarizing opinion.
I love the little niceties of rendering arrows which are used all over the place these days.
I am personally not a fan of ligatures, but since they seem to be entirely optional and controlled by the IDE, I think it would be nice to see them included. For people not like me, because it won't hurt me, and will broaden the appeal.
I love this take, thanks for being pragmatic and open minded!
Yeah, I'm one of those people who has spent so long with ligatures that not having them is a deal breaker for me.
I use PragmataPro and have done for many years. It's pretty similar to this but has lots of nice ligatures.
Yup, instant purchase, if/when ligatures are added.
+1, this would be an instant purchase if it included ligature options. I like supporting font designers but for a mono font I need this.
I like the typeface but I think it would be helpful to have a way for someone to copy and paste their code as a preview but I think that if you allowed that then others could download your font for free. You might want to mention that it costs $75 above the fold and I would think that you would want also to center the column of the site itself (these are nitpicks though).
One option to allow users to preview the font while not letting them download it for free is to have them submit their code sample, render an image of it on the server, then send that back to the user. Not as nice as rendering the font in browser, of course, but it works.
The problem with rendering a picture is that it doesn't reflect how it renders on my setup in my editor which can be quite important.
I've seen projects posted here that render your code as a screenshot for posting online or something. (??) That always seemed silly to me.
This is would be the perfect application of it.
I was thinking that but others also mentioned to have a trial mode font that didn’t have a complete character set also. Rendering a picture might become costly.
I am impressed by how quickly the page loaded, looked at the source code and what do you know? No modern UI library being used, semantic class names and not a lot of code being loaded. I'm impressed by the simplicity!
I really like the font, but I doubt that a claim of “wide language support” can be made when Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and other scripts are not supported.
Greek is on the way (last pic on the blog post) and more to come soon: https://neil.computer/notes/berkeley-mono-february-update/
Current support:
Thanks, that's nice to hear!
The author is in this thread... a corp license is $30 / year and a personal license is $75 forever.
Maybe we could do a one time HN group buy @ $30 forever just this one time? Say a minimum of 25 people agree?
I'd love to join the group buy if it is possible
The author didn't respond on here... assuming he saw this I guess he wasn't interested.
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I do not have any problems paying for something that I will use several hours every day. But would like to try the font in my editor before purchasing. Could have a demo download that only contains the most common letters like A-z0-9 and the brackets etc ([{:,.-_|&! Sure many will use the "demo" forever, but those people might be future customers and mouth-to-mouth marketers
It looks really nice! Probably not $75 of nice for me, but I can appreciate that the designer ought to get compensated for their effort.
I know I'm the niche of the niche, but many fonts I tried, have problems rendering Turkish characters e.g "ş" "ı" "ğ" "ü", does the font support these, if yes, could we get a screenshot with iTerm2 if possible? :)
Merhaba :) they are visible in this image [1], so I assume they are supported, but I sadly don't have the font myself to try it out.
[1] https://neil.computer/content/images/size/w1600/2022/02/berk...
Teşekkürler!
I use the Go font:
https://go.dev/blog/go-fonts
Free and beautiful.
These are good fonts but it’s unclear why it’s not released under a proper font license like SIL Open Font License. This would make the use of the fonts much easier.
I wish the page had more examples at, say, the 10pt size which is more comparable to what I am using in my editor. The huge copy in the examples look beautiful but they hardly map to real world usage so not entirely helpful...
+1000. It would also be useful to see it rendered at small sizes on different OS's -- macOS and Windows and some X environments -- because the font renderers on different platforms produce different visual results and the differences are often more visible at smaller sizes.
I think this is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Of course the creators should get paid, its a lifetime license, I'm going to forgo some of my usual BS purchases and get it.
side note: what an absolutely beautiful website. clear and fast. I love it.
Yes, but why make it left aligned?
I like the limited width and left aligned text is also good, but IMHO the content as a whole should be in the center of the web page.
Why should the content be in the center of the webpage?
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Having flashbacks to Sun 3/60 bootp sequence to get X served to them. Nice.
As a dev who constantly switches out fonts / themes & also pays for them, a few things to note:
- I mainly test for clarity, how HD something is on my IDE from 12 to 16px. I paid for Monolisa (which I like a lot) but other open source fonts actually have higher fidelity(Luculent, Fairfax HD, Hermit, Agave) - this gives me pause on purchase of license. - No ligatures isn’t a deal breaker, but many open source fonts have them Day 1 & are implementing them well. My work place has lambdas & operators all over code base - some fonts make it easier to parse around. - Price is not bad overall, as I feel paid fonts are Quality of Life coder tools, like mechanical keyboards (pro surfers don’t use surfboards from Walmart). - Summary is that I’m on the verge to take the plunge but really need a day or 2 in the trenches with it to see how I flow with it. Trial version should exist like others say. Similarities to JetBrains Mono are there even if unintentionally so. - I support indie mono fonts, keep iterating!
i actually really like the font, but I'm super turned off by the copy. i feel like this kind of writing belongs on a wine bottle or in a calvin klein catalog. to each their own, i suppose.
I enquired and I was told in no uncertain terms that the license forbids patching. This means that you cannot use the popular Nerd Fonts [1] patch set for adding missing glyphs. I hope that will change as I would like to use this typeface.
[1] https://www.nerdfonts.com/
That's quite disappointing. As a Neovim user, I depend on nerd fonts for icons. Does the license forbid patching even for personal use? Or is it only forbidden to re-distribute the patched font, by using it on a website for example?
I'm not familiar with Nerd Fonts; is there a reason that font-fallback can't be used for missing glyphs?
This looks very nice. I've used Latin Modern Mono[1] as my monospace font for a decade, but this is seriously making my consider a switch!
[1]: https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/latin-modern-mono
Love this, but I find the yearly / per-seat pricing for commercial use very hostile. Nobody wants to be chasing bills for a single typeface in their project. A one-off charge somewhere between $300-$999 would be much more attractive, buy-and-forget.
I'd pay something to use this on my personal machine, but I don't make printed materials, I just like a nice terminal font.
Nor do I much care to use web fonts either, so while its very pretty, I dont know that its 75 dollars worth of pretty.
Berkeley Mono Trial version is now available: https://berkeleygraphics.com/typefaces/berkeley-mono
Looks nice.
You could support Hungarian with only two additional letters.
I find the subscription license for commercial use a bit problematic. Say I have an app and I want to use the font. That’s “commercial” as long as it’s not “personal” AFAICT… and if I stop paying your fee some day then technically the app has to be modified or taken down.
This might not be a problem, but it’s not really “no strings attached.” There should be a fixed-fee perpetual commercial license as well.
Best of luck with it, I’m sure it’s hard to compete with all the free developer fonts!
If you look at the Burgevouns comparison Berkley mono is the least good. It's compared to non-mono fonts which, naturally, have better kerning. Having three different representations of the number 0 including one that is indistinguishable from upper case o makes this a no-no for coding from my point of view. It's one of the first things I look for and why I love Hack.
https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/
You get to pick which kind of 0 to use. If you don't like the plain one then use a different one. It's better to have options.
As a designer I love how much typography is appreciated on HN.
The Zero and capital "O" look quite similar to my eye: https://berkeleygraphics.com/static/images/marketing/code-sy...
I doubt that this amount of work overlooked such a common programming font comparison. Any idea why they made them nearly identical?
You customize it before you download it. There are four different zeroes and only one looks like the O. See the other examples.
There are 4 versions of zero glyph, I need to fix the comparison image though. It should be showing zero with a dot.
Edit: Fixed. Thank you!
https://berkeleygraphics.com/static/images/marketing/code-sy...
Is it available as a bitmap font, i.e pcf or bdf? It is the only way I can get mono spaced fonts as crisp as I like them in linux desktop terminals.
The "This page has been intentionally left blank." in the datasheet... what a beautiful & hilarious touch.
All those zero glyphs... is it getting hot in here??
Never seen that one with the negative-space slash. Is there a name for that?
I'm confused; what controls which of the zero glyphs you see?
We offer downloads of pre-configured stylistic sets (variations). All you need to do is download the specific version and install it. In applications such as Adobe Illustrator, you can select the variant using Open Type features: https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/special-characters...
This is the first time I see a new monospaced typeface and it does not immediately invoke some skepticism.
This one is tasty! It reminds me of Olivetti Cubic a bit, but definitely has its own distinctive style.
>comforting and yet stern, disciplined yet easy, regimented yet flexible
I admire the marketing copy very much!
I had a lot of fun with marketing. My style is always tongue-in-cheek, try to have fun, and has to be a little quirky!
Very derivative of OCR B by Frutiger. A shame it doesn't come out and say that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-B
Looks great, otherwise!
The comparison with OCR-B is on the website, here is a detailed view: https://berkeleygraphics.com/static/images/marketing/unique-...
Funny to see Haskell as the only (general purpose) language in the demo :-)
Overall I really like this, but a five-pointed asterisk? Everyone knows an asterisk should have six points!
Edit: in the datasheet PDF, on page 14, I'm seeing both styles of 7 render the same. ss05 and ss06
5 or 6 is usual, there are 7s too
https://github.com/cormullion/know-your-fonts/blob/master/as...
I really like the font. At least at mobile it seems to be extremely clear. I cannot pinpoint why.
But to try it in my editor it seems I need to buy a $75 license first. Is there another free download button I missed?
Nope, you didn't miss anything. The license is $75 for the developer package, you use it unlimited times, anywhere you want (except commercial use) and you get unlimited updates.
I was excited for it, but I cannot justify the price.
I may however consider the $25/year for commercial use if I ever want to use it.
Creator said somewhere in the thread he's considering a trial version.
Why the alternative version of "7"? The alternative zeroes are useful because zero looks like capital O, but with what would I confuse a "7"? Or is it there for another reason?
7 is similar to the italic 1, I guess. but also, the hand written version of 7 was taught to us, in Hungary, in the 1980s, with a small horizontal cross-line on the slanted stem of the 7. we quickly abandoned that small detail when writing, because we never saw that on printed material, though in writing 1 & 7 can be similar
I can’t tell from the page - is this powerline compatible? Many of us all have fancy prompts and other text envs that need powerline glyph support.
I like it, but there's one thing about fonts that always gets me is that it looks better in the pictures than it does in my editors.
That marketing animation looked absolutely amazing!
I see all Hungarian letters supported in the central-European character set, I think you can add it to the list of supported languages.
This looks great. It reminds me very much of the old vt100 font except that obviously without visible pixelation and gaps. Nice job.
Oh my word just installed these- They look absolutely dope. If anything it looks better in my actual terminal than on the website. very happy to pay for such great design.
Also the checkout flow on the website was super-slick. Nice job all round.
It's really rather beautiful. I'd love to able t run it in my terminal or my emacs. IDK, maybe when I can splurge.
I am against serifs but for monospace fonts I find it to be a necessity. For me the examples are very hard to read.
pt mono is my go to. you?
Does it has ligatures? If it doesn't, it should be a pretty good thing to add to some people.
Nowhere on the page does it show the font being used in a code editor with code colorization
At a risk of sounding like a font snob, what's the difference between this and Roboto?
A font snob wouldn’t ask this question :)
But I’m glad you asked. Learn about how font characters are structured[0]. Then zoom in, inspect and compare the details of a few characters from both fonts. This will help you understand how they’re different.
[0] https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-1/typ...
At a risk of sounding unfriendly, the best way I know is to look at them side by side.
They are different fonts.
A lot of good looking mono fonts look very similar and there is a reason for that. As designers fine tune features for better legibility (main concern with terminal typeface) fonts converge to look roughly the same. But they still have different feel when you get a lot of text on a screen.
A very distinctive feature of Berkeley Mono seems to be the squared-circle used in the rounded characters, where Roboto has very circular characters. I'm sure there a lot more differences if I saw them side-by-side, but that's the most obvious one for this font snob.
Looks nice. I might even change
Does anyone know what font is used for the copy of this website?
Inspecting the page in the Inspector shows that it's using the Univers[1] font
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univers
Looks like it is something called "Univers LT Pro".
I like the font. But I think it really misses a light variant.
Looks great, congrats.
I refuse to support any typeface that lacks my háček
That's a really nice set of uppercase letters.
Very similar to JetBrains Mono.
Love it.
Looks nice, but Consolas is the best IMO.
l is wrong, no go for me
> Berkeley Mono wears a UNIX T-shirt and aspires to be etched on control panels in black synthetic lacquer. It is Adrian Frutiger visits Bell Labs. It is Gene Kranz's command. It operates with calibrated precision and has a datasheet.
It costs $75 for an individual license, not really in the spirit of UNIX
One of the strongest indicators that FOSS has eaten the world is that we've all forgotten that UNIX licenses used to be thousands of dollars.
And that's before you even bought the compiler license!
I wasn’t there, but I’ve heard that the AT&T-initiated compiler “debundling” was the thing that kick-started the popularity of the GNU userland, with GCC acting as the gateway drug. So not only are these facts related, they are apparently even causally so.
UNIX was an internal and then commercial product of ATT bell labs (and later Novell). You're misconstruing it with the FOSS movement.
UNIX was created for ATT to sell more telephone service, and then later sold and licensed to other companies to likewise improve their internal computer usage. UNIX was not created to be zero cost. Apparently a commercial license for UNIX cost $20k at the time (or $150 for universities/educational institutions).
edit: IMHO $75 one time is a fair price for a premium font. Designers regularly pay $300 or more for typefaces they use in their work. There are monthly subscriptions to font foundries that cost more too.
The historical origin that I learned for UNIX was that it was created mostly out of frustration with Multics, and that its original "primary" use was running one of Ken Thompson's video games[1]. It was originally written for a PDP-7, which was already obsolete at the time and probably wasn't a target for telecommunications software.
It was only much later (and after significant arm twisting for more computing resources) that AT&T took UNIX seriously. Even then, the first marketed versions of UNIX were oriented towards programmers and technical editors, not telecommunication[2].
[1]: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.pdf
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX
It was certainly not created to sell more telephone service. It was a research project that found applications to run on it, most of which had little if anything to do with telephone service at first. Much later UNIX was adapted to run telephone network equipment.
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UNIX was created for ATT to sell more telephone service
From where did you get this idea? Citation needed.
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> It costs $75 for an individual license, not really in the spirit of UNIX
Eh, I think it’s a fair price, a. And b, pretty apt when you consider most Unixes were priced per core. BSD/OS itself was $1000 back in the day, according to my research, which was cheaper than System V, but obviously still expensive.
Linux was created for a reason.
And here I’ll refrain from making a snarky remark about how someone should make a similar font that is lower quality but will be way more popular.
Really? In Ye Olde Dayes, there was some pretty pricey Unix software.
I remember the days of $800/cpu for a System V R2 license with no outline fonts :)
Heck, I remember OpenStep costing around $700 back in the 90’s.
Yeah, every time a typeface is shared on here it is met with some opposition since most cost money for individuals/personal use. I understand it's hard to take the time to design a nice typeface and that the creators should be compensated for their work, but sadly it means fonts like these are practically limited to commercial use. I wonder if there's a better way to turn a profit on typefaces - there's been a handful of really interesting ones posted on HN I've wanted to try.
There is a ton of entitlement nowadays, that's for sure.
One should be grateful to those who do release their hard work to the public domain or under a FOSS license, rather than being resentful toward those who don't.
People absolutely deserve to be compensated for their work, if they so choose, and they are absolutely permitted to release their work under any license they want.
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You might be interested in futurefonts.xyz. Kind of like Kickstarter for fonts. You pay for typefaces in development. Price goes up as more features and components get added but you get everything that’s included when you buy it and then everything that’s added afterward for no additional cost.
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Not to pile on, but I will say, for the record that it's UNIX® :)
uhh, unix was insanely expensive.