I have bought it on sight, and never regretted a second after installing it. It's readable, easy on the eyes, and really brings the character of "the golden era of computing" to your environment. As a person who have started with computers relatively early, this font makes me feel at home.
I use it on my terminals, text editors, IDE, and browser, and it's both unobtrusive and delightful, at the same time. If you're into dark themes, pair with Gruvbox Dark. You won't regret it.
It's doesn't follow the trend, but puts its own rules on the table, and it shows.
As someone who spent a lot of time sorting, collecting, and selecting typefaces in a print shop, as soon as I saw the details in Berekeley Mono it was a similar experience. (Take my money) It's homey while having the appropriate modernity for legibility.
I prefer the version with ligatures disabled, but it's nice to see them available.
I already expect Neil will earn a purchase from me for Houston Mono when it's available. I have a terminal based "game" experience I've been toying with and waiting to use it for.
Second your Gruvbox comment, although I recently decided to take TokyoNight for a spin, I'll loop back eventually, probably!
Personally, I saw the ligatures and really didn't like them. The /= and ||= look monumentally ugly to me for C code, and makes the meaning less clear. The only ones that looked worthwhile were /* and */. The rest just seemed to be ligatures for the sake of it.
There's a suspicious amount of comments posted at roughly the same time praising the font and claiming the price is worth it. These comments include "after a few trial days", which is unrealistic, because no sane person would go for "a few days" with swapped slashes and backslashes.
Lay off the paranoia. I’m one of the people who bought it because I like it, but I have zero to do with the author except as a normal customer. Get it or not, it’s no skin off my back. But I like to say nice things about stuff I enjoy, and this is one of them.
The trial (license valid for 7 days) is "Limited to ASCII-128 character set" but also says:
>Swapped: '/' and '\', '*' and '#'
Is that latter a common sort of thing in this scenario? I get the idea—certainly makes coding/terminal/markdown annoying—but I don't think I've seen that done elsewhere.
Berkeley Mono is my favourite! It's the crossed seven that matches my handwritten style which I really appreciate. Not very common in other monospace fonts I've tried.
I really enjoy this font for development and writing documentation. I carry it around for everything. Default monospace across the board: Terminal, IDE, Notes; sometimes I go buck-wild and monospace the entire Desktop-Environment to match.
I also write Z and z with a stroke. And then someone on Twitter suggested we should add it as an option. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it despite of writing it that way! It’s coming.
I guess it’s also something cultural depending on where we live. I’m from France and here a lot of people cross 7 and Z, and write 1 with a bottom bar. When I went to Japan, I found that a lot of people were disturbed by those "European" variants.
Every so often I go on a “font bender” and start searching for my “next great coding font”. I’ve been using Hack (https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/) for several years, but after looking at this I might need to give it a try. It looks really nice and the price is right. The font in the OP looks great too, but I can’t bring myself to pay for it. Not when there’s so many great alternatives out there at no cost.
One class of alternatives you could also consider is narrow fonts like PragmataPro[1] (commercial) or Iosevka[2] (gratis, FOSS). Being able to fit more stuff onto the screen side-by-side is what enabled me to get as much into tmux as I have.
I bought it – or rather, asked for it as a gift from my wife – and it was well worth it. It brings me just a tiny bit of joy every time I see one of the beautiful ligatures in my terminal, and I was also just happy to support the creator. It takes effort to make a well-formed font, and I am thankful that there are people willing to devote time to it.
I'm a huge fan of this typeface. Initially, I was skeptic about paying, but I spent hours every single day on the screen, and after using the trial for a few days, I was sold. It's extremely good designed, the numbers are crisp, and everything is well-balanced and thought out. It's worth every single cent.
That's the logic that nudged me to buy it. I have a nice chair. I have a nice keyboard. I have a nice mouse. I have nice monitors. All of those cost more than the one-time license for something I stare at for hours a day. I've spent all that money to make my body comfortable. Why not do the same for my eyes?
A year later, I still love the way code looks on my screen. I feel like it's one of the better investments I've made.
This was the first time I bought a font, and -- surprisingly -- I haven't regretted it at all. Every time I look at my terminal there's always a little bit of happiness at how elegant the font looks.
No Cyrillic languages. It shows only few ligatures for JavaScript. And with this in mind it costs $75 when there are plenty free alternatives. Who's the target audience here?
Me. I’m under one of the supported languages, do not write JavaScript (and while all the languages I use has ligatures, I don’t use them), spend 10 hours in front of a terminal/editor/IDE, and love computing at 70s, plus love the 70s aesthetics.
If you think $75 is expensive is for a functional piece of art, look at the license of Operator Mono.
Me, apparently. I think it looks gorgeous. I don't speak any languages that are written in Cyrillic and I don't like ligatures in code. But I want that 1970s Unix feeling...
This looks like a joke: “ DO NOT OPERATE ON CRITICAL CODE WITH THE TRIAL FONT. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR DAMAGES TO YOUR MAINFRAME SYSTEM OR OTHERWISE.”
How about you post something new for a change, instead of asking this question repeatedly and not getting the idea that other people might have had a different experience from you.
That's just it tho. We never know why OP shared it. Did something change on the page? A new feature? Hardly anything has dates. Maybe it's just their own personal discovery of the day. (Then maybe they could just browse the previous posts if it's not news. Save us some of the repeated discussion points over and over.) You don't know if I've even seen it before. But I know from search it's not new. I know others might not have seen it. But people need to also realize things aren't new, that there might be history, that things aren't just popping into existence because they just noticed them. There's all kinds of dupes on here and sites like this that pop up here and there and it's nice to know context, if any.
Berkeley Mono is also my favourite font. I use it in the terminal, editor and for my IDE.
It's a bit expensive, and I can understand if someone can't or doesn't want to spend money on it. I would recommend to check out the free fonts 'JetBrains Mono' & 'Hack' to these people.
Some people have already mentioned here that Berkeley Mono is not available as Nerd Font. I would like to briefly point out that Nerd Fonts provides a font patcher tool (https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts#font-patcher).
Has anyone successfully turned this into a nerd font? I'd love to know it works before handing over my $75.
Update: I tried the font patcher on the trial version, but it didn't work. The font patcher ran successfully, and I can see all the added glyphs in Font Book on my Mac, but the glyphs don't work in my terminal.
I like the font and was thinking about putting it on my blog, but $75 seems like a lot when there are other pretty good options. Maybe I'll test the free version and see if I love it..
Finally a good programming font. There's always a catch, 0 vs O, l vs. | vs I, ( too similar to [ (looking at you B612), but this, this one seems to cover all the bases.
Sad about the pricing. For the developed world it's Ok, but spending >25% of a minimum wage on a font is too much for me.
A good alternative to me is Spline Sans Mono. I don't like its curved "l", though.
I bought it awhile back and switched a bunch of apps over to using it. I’ve had a few people comment while doing a screen share that my terminal/console/ide looks cool. I only use the stock themes on most things I use (Microsoft terminal, vs code, eMacs). They’re basically noticing the font but can’t place the difference ;)
I really like Berkeley, JetBrains Mono, etc, but at this point I simply can't move away from Fira Code. It's, like, what code looks like to me at this point.
Intel One Mono. Not extremely different from Berkeley Mono it looks like but lower x-height, higher line height, more space around letters, and a number of smallish differences (mostly in the lower case letters and numbers and round dots instead of square). Intel has the extra visible {} and non-continuous % while Berkeley Mono has the funky @.
These typefaces that give the illusion of not being monospace are fun! And this one was a good example of those. Very easy on the eye and even with a spark of timeless retro computing. They manage get a lot into a single typeface here.
On the serif side of things there's Go mono, which I like a lot and also doesn't feel monospaced. To me it makes code look friendly, like the pages of a book.
Seems really nice, and I was about to order, but then I looked at how the trial version renders the word "Berkeley". On my screen it looks like "Be r ke ley".
I have been hovering the buy button for a while now, the only thing that's keeping me to buy yet is that I really like Extralight/Thin fonts. I hope they add such a version.
It's nice, but I don't want to be paying for my principal developer font, when there are dozens of free alternatives.
I am also hesitant about working (even free) third-party tools into my workflow. I have had the pleasure of dealing with these tools going belly-up (a couple just did, but they were important -not critical).
"Hesitant about" -not the same thing as "refuse to"
I use Xcode. Arguably, it's "free," if you ignore the fact that I run it on a $4,000 computer, but it is also the OS maker's tool of choice.
But each tool I add, each dependency in my workflow, is another rusty link in the chain.
I feel that we have gotten a bit too comfortable with adding ingredients to the stew.
A font isn't really that big a deal (unless you sell them). Things like documentation generators and linters, are more substantial (and I just had to remove both from my workflow, because they don't seem to have survived the shift to Xcode 15).
It's the nicest monospace font I've seen in a while, and I'd love to try it out, but $75 is a rather hefty price for development use. I don't mean to diminish the work that's been done, but more... I wonder if you could sell twice as much by cutting the price in half.
For a paid font $75 for an unlimited lifetime license is not at all expensive. I suspect the difficulty isn't so much getting people to pay $75 for a font, but getting people to pay for a font in the first place. The font market is essentially split between free fonts and expensive fonts. The people willing to pay for fonts are not particularly price sensitive, because if they were they would just be using a free font.
It's also that the market for "font customers" (for typesetting, design, etc.) and for developers who want a font in VSCode is very, very different.
What I'm seeing in this discussion is that the developer market is pretty price-sensitive, possibly because they're paying out of pocket and not charging back to clients or expensing.
> The people willing to pay for fonts are not particularly price sensitive, because if they were they would just be using a free font.
Fair enough, there might not be as many people ready to pay for a font as I imagine.
As for the price, it's entirely to the discretion of the maker and it's impossible to determine what the value is for the customer, so I'm not judging that.
It does price out people from lower purchasing power countries and people who are short on cash (hey that's me). But as you mentioned, it's very possible that a lot of these people would rather use a free font.
I'll save this one for when I have more disposable income :)
It's not just free? Instead it's $75 for an individual "license" and they sell enterprise licenses? Seems quite out of line with the vibe they portray the font embodies
Where does one even get the idea that Unix = free (as in beer)? In fact, licenses for the original UNIX distros from Bell Labs retailed for literally thousands of dollars at the time. Various Unix-likes have names like FreeBSD for a reason.
No, it's not free. Fonts are incredibly labor intensive and require both artistic and technical skill. $75 for a family of well designed fonts pretty much at the bottom of the barrel for paid fonts. Check out the pricing for a single variant of something like Helvetica or FF Meta some time. A single family may very well be someone's entire life's work. Same reason that you get paid to bang on a keyboard while open source exists.
That said I've not bought Berkeley Mono, and probably won't (mostly because the style isn't quite to my current taste). I've bought fonts in the past, typically drawing the piracy line when I make money from a font (e.g. letterhead, business cards). Over the past two decades the list includes: Bell Centennial and Bell Gothic (great at small sizes), FF Meta and FF Zwo (for copy), and FF Mister K (uses ligatures to create a more organic looking handwriting font).
Much like with other software there are great free alternatives that pop up every once in a while on HN when the topic of coding fonts comes up. Fira Code (by Erik Spiekermann of FF fame), Plex (IBM), Source Code (Adobe), Cascadia (Microsoft), and JetBrains Mono (duh). Notice that they're all backed by large orgs — again, fonts are a ton of work. Contrast that with something like B612 (Airbus) which is cool but also basically abandonware and lacks the fit and finish of the previous fonts.
If you want the retro vibe and are okay pirating abandonware, the guy at int10h.org maintains a collection of fonts scraped from vintage ROMs[0]. But again these lack the polish you may be used to as they're way out of their element on modern systems.
Me? I'm currently using M+ Code 60[1] (Coji Morishita backed by Google) as a daily driver[2]. I'm enamored with its slightly quirky style (just enough to keep me interested) and its legibility as a console font.
> If you want the retro vibe and are okay pirating abandonware, the guy at int10h.org maintains a collection of fonts scraped from vintage ROMs.
In the US, bitmapped fonts are not covered by copyright, as they're considered to be digital representations of typefaces (which aren't covered either).
super annoying web design from a graphic design company to show a typeface that purports its goal is to "get out of the way" so you can be productive, why not show some calm examples of text as in a terminal at a normal typesize? I had to zoom out to 60% just to tame it, and yet there was still blinking all over the place and nothing that approximated anything other than a phone screen.
does something about this typeface set it apart in a useful way from the zillion other free or default monospaced options? If anything it seemed a little awkward with the flourishes they added toward making it look fauxCR-able. (an artistic flourish I like as "zany graphic fun" but is it helpful for extended use?)
for the people who love it, I've no problem with enjoying flourishes, but it's calling itself serious. I'm serious and it's not taking me seriously.
Fair criticism about samples, launching new update and it'll have better samples. Also, you're welcome to download the trial—best way to see how it looks in your specific setup.
I don't agree with your take on flourishes (in better terms, artistry). Every typeface has it. The process of designing a typeface is full of subjectivity and artistry.
Berkeley Mono is plain gorgeous. I bought it after five minutes of looking at the trial. Everything made so much sense when I saw the inspirations you listed - Eurostile, OCR-B and DIN 1451 all have a special place in my heart.
But what's more, your site in its entirety is a work of art, in form and function. So many details, from the one-click newsletter signup when logged in to the plain-English license intros. It makes me want to build a site for myself again, something I haven't done in over a decade.
To my own surprise I've even signed up for the newsletter, something I haven't done anywhere for even longer.
$75 license. I assume they want people to be wow'ed by the unrealistic zoom shots, and pay money before realizing that it's little different from JetBrains Mono or Roboto Mono in a real-world editor or terminal.
This sort of comment is why I have a love/hate relationship with HN. Love, because yesterday I learned some amazing stuff that I told my partner about in bed.
Hate, because of the assumptions that so many people are so quick to jump to. You know nothing about this guy’s motivations. (His name’s Neil. I’ve spoken to him. He seems like a really solid dude. He probably has thicker skin than me.)
So you come in here and you imply that this thing is essentially a scam to rob you of $75. You imply that Neil is a scammer, trying to rob you of $75.
It’s really shitty and I wish people wouldn’t do it.
Edit: I’m not saying “don’t criticise the site”. If you don’t like the site, say so. But don’t criticise the motivations about which you know literally nothing.
I have bought it on sight, and never regretted a second after installing it. It's readable, easy on the eyes, and really brings the character of "the golden era of computing" to your environment. As a person who have started with computers relatively early, this font makes me feel at home.
I use it on my terminals, text editors, IDE, and browser, and it's both unobtrusive and delightful, at the same time. If you're into dark themes, pair with Gruvbox Dark. You won't regret it.
It's doesn't follow the trend, but puts its own rules on the table, and it shows.
I can't recommend this enough.
As someone who spent a lot of time sorting, collecting, and selecting typefaces in a print shop, as soon as I saw the details in Berekeley Mono it was a similar experience. (Take my money) It's homey while having the appropriate modernity for legibility.
I prefer the version with ligatures disabled, but it's nice to see them available.
I already expect Neil will earn a purchase from me for Houston Mono when it's available. I have a terminal based "game" experience I've been toying with and waiting to use it for.
Second your Gruvbox comment, although I recently decided to take TokyoNight for a spin, I'll loop back eventually, probably!
Personally, I saw the ligatures and really didn't like them. The /= and ||= look monumentally ugly to me for C code, and makes the meaning less clear. The only ones that looked worthwhile were /* and */. The rest just seemed to be ligatures for the sake of it.
Same, I bought Monolisa before discovering Berkeley Mono, and then I was really angry for how much more I paid for a worse font.
There's a suspicious amount of comments posted at roughly the same time praising the font and claiming the price is worth it. These comments include "after a few trial days", which is unrealistic, because no sane person would go for "a few days" with swapped slashes and backslashes.
Lay off the paranoia. I’m one of the people who bought it because I like it, but I have zero to do with the author except as a normal customer. Get it or not, it’s no skin off my back. But I like to say nice things about stuff I enjoy, and this is one of them.
Uh, why not? You don't have to use the trial version font in every application.
(I almost bought it after trialing it for a few days, but ended up going with MonoLisa.)
Strange accusation. I don’t see such comments that lived with the trial version.
Can you back up your astroturfing claim with explicit links to each comment that fits your description?
Because I found none.
The trial (license valid for 7 days) is "Limited to ASCII-128 character set" but also says:
>Swapped: '/' and '\', '*' and '#'
Is that latter a common sort of thing in this scenario? I get the idea—certainly makes coding/terminal/markdown annoying—but I don't think I've seen that done elsewhere.
I have seen a couple of trial fonts changed crucial 1-2 characters with the logo of the foundry. This is not very rare practice.
Berkeley Mono is my favourite! It's the crossed seven that matches my handwritten style which I really appreciate. Not very common in other monospace fonts I've tried.
I really enjoy this font for development and writing documentation. I carry it around for everything. Default monospace across the board: Terminal, IDE, Notes; sometimes I go buck-wild and monospace the entire Desktop-Environment to match.
I always felt a bit like a weirdo writing 7 that way - no one I know writes it that way. Glad to find there are other folks like me.
I also write Z and z with a stroke. And then someone on Twitter suggested we should add it as an option. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it despite of writing it that way! It’s coming.
4 replies →
I guess it’s also something cultural depending on where we live. I’m from France and here a lot of people cross 7 and Z, and write 1 with a bottom bar. When I went to Japan, I found that a lot of people were disturbed by those "European" variants.
I recently discovered Monaspace [0] and was fairly impressed by its texture healing feature, besides generally looking nice. And it's free.
[0] https://monaspace.githubnext.com/
Every so often I go on a “font bender” and start searching for my “next great coding font”. I’ve been using Hack (https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/) for several years, but after looking at this I might need to give it a try. It looks really nice and the price is right. The font in the OP looks great too, but I can’t bring myself to pay for it. Not when there’s so many great alternatives out there at no cost.
One class of alternatives you could also consider is narrow fonts like PragmataPro[1] (commercial) or Iosevka[2] (gratis, FOSS). Being able to fit more stuff onto the screen side-by-side is what enabled me to get as much into tmux as I have.
[1] https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/
[2] https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
2 replies →
Same. I love experimenting with my coding font and for the past year or so I was using Hack.
I wasn't able to find anything better yet after trying a lot of fonts: Fira, JetBrains Mono, Iosevka, Monaspace, Ubuntu Mono, and others.
Or perhaps I'm too familiar with Hack now and everything else now looks weird..
1 reply →
I was the same until I started using Fira Code and don't think I'll ever go back to anything else. the ligatures are worth it
https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode
7 replies →
Monaspace has been on the HN frontpage a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210574
As for free, monospaced fonts, there is also FiraCode.
Fira Code: free monospaced font with programming ligatures
https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode
EDIT: @airstrike beat me to it. Anyway, that's my favorite.
This is actually very legible and pleasing to eye. I was mostly using JetBrains Mono until I found Monaspace randomly and it is currently now default.
Can highly recommend, also it is free and has several styles(x5).
This is awesome, I'll try it out when I get back to the office. Very nice find
I bought it – or rather, asked for it as a gift from my wife – and it was well worth it. It brings me just a tiny bit of joy every time I see one of the beautiful ligatures in my terminal, and I was also just happy to support the creator. It takes effort to make a well-formed font, and I am thankful that there are people willing to devote time to it.
I'm a huge fan of this typeface. Initially, I was skeptic about paying, but I spent hours every single day on the screen, and after using the trial for a few days, I was sold. It's extremely good designed, the numbers are crisp, and everything is well-balanced and thought out. It's worth every single cent.
That's the logic that nudged me to buy it. I have a nice chair. I have a nice keyboard. I have a nice mouse. I have nice monitors. All of those cost more than the one-time license for something I stare at for hours a day. I've spent all that money to make my body comfortable. Why not do the same for my eyes?
A year later, I still love the way code looks on my screen. I feel like it's one of the better investments I've made.
This was the first time I bought a font, and -- surprisingly -- I haven't regretted it at all. Every time I look at my terminal there's always a little bit of happiness at how elegant the font looks.
No Cyrillic languages. It shows only few ligatures for JavaScript. And with this in mind it costs $75 when there are plenty free alternatives. Who's the target audience here?
Me. I’m under one of the supported languages, do not write JavaScript (and while all the languages I use has ligatures, I don’t use them), spend 10 hours in front of a terminal/editor/IDE, and love computing at 70s, plus love the 70s aesthetics.
If you think $75 is expensive is for a functional piece of art, look at the license of Operator Mono.
Me, apparently. I think it looks gorgeous. I don't speak any languages that are written in Cyrillic and I don't like ligatures in code. But I want that 1970s Unix feeling...
I found it very odd listing a bunch of languages and not providing support for Cyrillic family...
It even lists Serbian.
This looks like a joke: “ DO NOT OPERATE ON CRITICAL CODE WITH THE TRIAL FONT. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR DAMAGES TO YOUR MAINFRAME SYSTEM OR OTHERWISE.”
Because they swapped some characters like \ to /, if I remember correctly.
I have paid for this and I am using it in the Terminal, in my IDE and even on my CV! It is a great font and I highly recommend it.
Anything new here?
Bunch of discussion last year on a Show HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30557557
The ligatures were released earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34583520
Anything new here?
Not for you. But for others, yes.
How about you post something new for a change, instead of asking this question repeatedly and not getting the idea that other people might have had a different experience from you.
That's just it tho. We never know why OP shared it. Did something change on the page? A new feature? Hardly anything has dates. Maybe it's just their own personal discovery of the day. (Then maybe they could just browse the previous posts if it's not news. Save us some of the repeated discussion points over and over.) You don't know if I've even seen it before. But I know from search it's not new. I know others might not have seen it. But people need to also realize things aren't new, that there might be history, that things aren't just popping into existence because they just noticed them. There's all kinds of dupes on here and sites like this that pop up here and there and it's nice to know context, if any.
2 replies →
read the room.
Berkeley Mono is also my favourite font. I use it in the terminal, editor and for my IDE. It's a bit expensive, and I can understand if someone can't or doesn't want to spend money on it. I would recommend to check out the free fonts 'JetBrains Mono' & 'Hack' to these people.
Some people have already mentioned here that Berkeley Mono is not available as Nerd Font. I would like to briefly point out that Nerd Fonts provides a font patcher tool (https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts#font-patcher).
Has anyone successfully turned this into a nerd font? I'd love to know it works before handing over my $75.
Update: I tried the font patcher on the trial version, but it didn't work. The font patcher ran successfully, and I can see all the added glyphs in Font Book on my Mac, but the glyphs don't work in my terminal.
Output from the font patcher is here: https://app.warp.dev/block/sWNVtsGQkYqvaa3HXa0eFN
Further update: Works in iTerm2, but not in Warp. The plot thickens!
Further further update: Some removing and restarting and reinstalling fixed it! I think Warp was caching something.
Idk about trial, but the full version has no issue with patching, try these instructions and see if it works: https://twitter.com/thorstenball/status/1629396583983853764
Also first thing I thought of. I haven't had the chance to try it, but NerdFonts has a font patcher CLI tool that should be able to fix that.
i bought and have been using Berkeley Mono exclusively. it's well worth the cost
Check the difference between Sf mono and this, not worth 75$ usd
SF Mono is a good looking font, and probably inspired by a similar time in computing, but very different.
SF Mono is my goto as well.
It doesn't try too hard and is legible, for me, at smaller sizes on macOS.
This does look very nice!
Still, I often go back to what I know and what I got used to as the default on the OS.
So, as a macOS user, I work with Apple's SF Mono:
I tried hard to get along with JetBrains Mono, but in the end I just didn't enjoy their ligatures!
Also, I never get bored of discussions on what dev monospace fonts people use! :-D
I’ve been using this font for almost 2 years now and I love how unique and interesting it still looks
I like the font and was thinking about putting it on my blog, but $75 seems like a lot when there are other pretty good options. Maybe I'll test the free version and see if I love it..
It’s a lot compared to free, but it’s a steal compared to most fonts.
Support Neil, he’s a good chap. I can’t wait for Houston!
Same here. I semi routinely check the website for any updates, but alas.
I’m sure it’s cooking and will be done when it’s done, but the teaser really makes me excited.
I bought it. I love it. I wonder when the next version will come out.
Finally a good programming font. There's always a catch, 0 vs O, l vs. | vs I, ( too similar to [ (looking at you B612), but this, this one seems to cover all the bases. Sad about the pricing. For the developed world it's Ok, but spending >25% of a minimum wage on a font is too much for me.
A good alternative to me is Spline Sans Mono. I don't like its curved "l", though.
I bought it awhile back and switched a bunch of apps over to using it. I’ve had a few people comment while doing a screen share that my terminal/console/ide looks cool. I only use the stock themes on most things I use (Microsoft terminal, vs code, eMacs). They’re basically noticing the font but can’t place the difference ;)
JetBrains Mono ftw. Also, what’s with this weird slash swapping after the trial period!
Fira Code and Caskaydia are my favorites.
I really like Berkeley, JetBrains Mono, etc, but at this point I simply can't move away from Fira Code. It's, like, what code looks like to me at this point.
Is this the recommendations sub-thread? Inconsolata is the best i've used.
Intel One Mono. Not extremely different from Berkeley Mono it looks like but lower x-height, higher line height, more space around letters, and a number of smallish differences (mostly in the lower case letters and numbers and round dots instead of square). Intel has the extra visible {} and non-continuous % while Berkeley Mono has the funky @.
https://github.com/intel/intel-one-mono
Fellow Inconsolata fan here. I have to say this is probably the first time I'm considering switching and maybe even paying.
I like and use Fira Code too and even though Berkley might be an alternative, the price is too high just to have an alternative to Fira Code (IMHO).
These typefaces that give the illusion of not being monospace are fun! And this one was a good example of those. Very easy on the eye and even with a spark of timeless retro computing. They manage get a lot into a single typeface here.
On the serif side of things there's Go mono, which I like a lot and also doesn't feel monospaced. To me it makes code look friendly, like the pages of a book.
Seems really nice, and I was about to order, but then I looked at how the trial version renders the word "Berkeley". On my screen it looks like "Be r ke ley".
I have been hovering the buy button for a while now, the only thing that's keeping me to buy yet is that I really like Extralight/Thin fonts. I hope they add such a version.
Confusing presentation of the multiple 0 in the same sample box.
No CJK support? That's unfortunate, so far I've only found a single code font with CJK support (Code2000) and I'd really like a nicer one.
You could try Sarasa Gothic, which is made by the same person who made Iosevka.
Github Link: https://github.com/be5invis/Sarasa-Gothic
Specimen (made by someone else): https://picaq.github.io/sarasa/
There's also mplus 1 code:
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/M+PLUS+1+Code
https://mplusfonts.github.io/
I've been using a 3270 typeface, but I like this better! It's like what the 3270 face would look like if it had higher resolution available.
My first impression is the kerning/letter spacing feels off. Am I the only one?
Edit: for example the space between the ‘m’ and the ‘a’ in ‘machine’ seems very big.
No hungarian language support, meh
It's nice, but I don't want to be paying for my principal developer font, when there are dozens of free alternatives.
I am also hesitant about working (even free) third-party tools into my workflow. I have had the pleasure of dealing with these tools going belly-up (a couple just did, but they were important -not critical).
What?
"Hesitant about" -not the same thing as "refuse to"
I use Xcode. Arguably, it's "free," if you ignore the fact that I run it on a $4,000 computer, but it is also the OS maker's tool of choice.
But each tool I add, each dependency in my workflow, is another rusty link in the chain.
I feel that we have gotten a bit too comfortable with adding ingredients to the stew.
A font isn't really that big a deal (unless you sell them). Things like documentation generators and linters, are more substantial (and I just had to remove both from my workflow, because they don't seem to have survived the shift to Xcode 15).
2 replies →
Looks interesting. Developer license: $75. No free version.
I'm not paying $75 for an ugly blocky font.
I expected this to be free, damn.
It's the nicest monospace font I've seen in a while, and I'd love to try it out, but $75 is a rather hefty price for development use. I don't mean to diminish the work that's been done, but more... I wonder if you could sell twice as much by cutting the price in half.
$75 prices out quite a lot of people.
For a paid font $75 for an unlimited lifetime license is not at all expensive. I suspect the difficulty isn't so much getting people to pay $75 for a font, but getting people to pay for a font in the first place. The font market is essentially split between free fonts and expensive fonts. The people willing to pay for fonts are not particularly price sensitive, because if they were they would just be using a free font.
It's also that the market for "font customers" (for typesetting, design, etc.) and for developers who want a font in VSCode is very, very different.
What I'm seeing in this discussion is that the developer market is pretty price-sensitive, possibly because they're paying out of pocket and not charging back to clients or expensing.
> The people willing to pay for fonts are not particularly price sensitive, because if they were they would just be using a free font.
Fair enough, there might not be as many people ready to pay for a font as I imagine.
As for the price, it's entirely to the discretion of the maker and it's impossible to determine what the value is for the customer, so I'm not judging that.
It does price out people from lower purchasing power countries and people who are short on cash (hey that's me). But as you mentioned, it's very possible that a lot of these people would rather use a free font.
I'll save this one for when I have more disposable income :)
"You wouldn't steal a font"
There are so many good and free ones that I won't bother. I use SF Pro and Mono but I get bored and change to something else every year or two.
https://developer.apple.com/fonts/
Looks like OCR-B and Letter Gothic had a baby. There are better fonts for coding.
It's not just free? Instead it's $75 for an individual "license" and they sell enterprise licenses? Seems quite out of line with the vibe they portray the font embodies
Where does one even get the idea that Unix = free (as in beer)? In fact, licenses for the original UNIX distros from Bell Labs retailed for literally thousands of dollars at the time. Various Unix-likes have names like FreeBSD for a reason.
I stand corrected, then, and have updated my comment accordingly
No, it's not free. Fonts are incredibly labor intensive and require both artistic and technical skill. $75 for a family of well designed fonts pretty much at the bottom of the barrel for paid fonts. Check out the pricing for a single variant of something like Helvetica or FF Meta some time. A single family may very well be someone's entire life's work. Same reason that you get paid to bang on a keyboard while open source exists.
That said I've not bought Berkeley Mono, and probably won't (mostly because the style isn't quite to my current taste). I've bought fonts in the past, typically drawing the piracy line when I make money from a font (e.g. letterhead, business cards). Over the past two decades the list includes: Bell Centennial and Bell Gothic (great at small sizes), FF Meta and FF Zwo (for copy), and FF Mister K (uses ligatures to create a more organic looking handwriting font).
Much like with other software there are great free alternatives that pop up every once in a while on HN when the topic of coding fonts comes up. Fira Code (by Erik Spiekermann of FF fame), Plex (IBM), Source Code (Adobe), Cascadia (Microsoft), and JetBrains Mono (duh). Notice that they're all backed by large orgs — again, fonts are a ton of work. Contrast that with something like B612 (Airbus) which is cool but also basically abandonware and lacks the fit and finish of the previous fonts.
If you want the retro vibe and are okay pirating abandonware, the guy at int10h.org maintains a collection of fonts scraped from vintage ROMs[0]. But again these lack the polish you may be used to as they're way out of their element on modern systems.
Me? I'm currently using M+ Code 60[1] (Coji Morishita backed by Google) as a daily driver[2]. I'm enamored with its slightly quirky style (just enough to keep me interested) and its legibility as a console font.
0: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
1: https://mplusfonts.github.io
2: https://i.imgur.com/AG2IbT0.png
> If you want the retro vibe and are okay pirating abandonware, the guy at int10h.org maintains a collection of fonts scraped from vintage ROMs.
In the US, bitmapped fonts are not covered by copyright, as they're considered to be digital representations of typefaces (which aren't covered either).
This is how the true UNIXen of yore were sold.
The font says trial lol, what is there a pop up saying the 7 days is over? lol gtfoh
> Swapped: '/' and '\', '*' and '#'
It doesnt include all characters. Pretty standard practice for font trials.
IMO this is pretty hard to read. And why are there two different glyphs for the number 0?
Jetbrains Mono, which is also FOSS, seems nicer: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/
When you download you get pick what zero or 7 you want.
super annoying web design from a graphic design company to show a typeface that purports its goal is to "get out of the way" so you can be productive, why not show some calm examples of text as in a terminal at a normal typesize? I had to zoom out to 60% just to tame it, and yet there was still blinking all over the place and nothing that approximated anything other than a phone screen.
does something about this typeface set it apart in a useful way from the zillion other free or default monospaced options? If anything it seemed a little awkward with the flourishes they added toward making it look fauxCR-able. (an artistic flourish I like as "zany graphic fun" but is it helpful for extended use?)
for the people who love it, I've no problem with enjoying flourishes, but it's calling itself serious. I'm serious and it's not taking me seriously.
Fair criticism about samples, launching new update and it'll have better samples. Also, you're welcome to download the trial—best way to see how it looks in your specific setup.
I don't agree with your take on flourishes (in better terms, artistry). Every typeface has it. The process of designing a typeface is full of subjectivity and artistry.
Neil,
Berkeley Mono is plain gorgeous. I bought it after five minutes of looking at the trial. Everything made so much sense when I saw the inspirations you listed - Eurostile, OCR-B and DIN 1451 all have a special place in my heart.
But what's more, your site in its entirety is a work of art, in form and function. So many details, from the one-click newsletter signup when logged in to the plain-English license intros. It makes me want to build a site for myself again, something I haven't done in over a decade.
To my own surprise I've even signed up for the newsletter, something I haven't done anywhere for even longer.
Needlessly to say, I am a fan.
3 replies →
Oh if you're here: Any plans on covering APL/Miscellaneous Technical?
2 replies →
$75 license. I assume they want people to be wow'ed by the unrealistic zoom shots, and pay money before realizing that it's little different from JetBrains Mono or Roboto Mono in a real-world editor or terminal.
Downvote me for your life here, I don’t care.
This sort of comment is why I have a love/hate relationship with HN. Love, because yesterday I learned some amazing stuff that I told my partner about in bed.
Hate, because of the assumptions that so many people are so quick to jump to. You know nothing about this guy’s motivations. (His name’s Neil. I’ve spoken to him. He seems like a really solid dude. He probably has thicker skin than me.)
So you come in here and you imply that this thing is essentially a scam to rob you of $75. You imply that Neil is a scammer, trying to rob you of $75.
It’s really shitty and I wish people wouldn’t do it.
Edit: I’m not saying “don’t criticise the site”. If you don’t like the site, say so. But don’t criticise the motivations about which you know literally nothing.
7 replies →
> that it's little different from JetBrains Mono or Roboto Mono in a real-world editor or terminal.
On the contrary.