Show HN: Monolisa v3 – a typeface for developers and creatives
2 days ago (monolisa.dev)
Originally we (Andrey, Marcus, Juho) built MonoLisa in 2020 as we realised there's room for a better monospaced typeface for developers. The key insight was to make the glyphs slightly wider to make more room for design to make letters like m feel less cramped.
Since then we've released a variable v2 (2022) and now we're happy to expand the typeface with a new family called MonoLisa Text. The reasoning was to cover *other* use cases beyond coding with this proportional font.
We hope you give Monolisa a go as there's a free trial to try. We also welcome feedback!
$149 for a font for personal computer use is kind of steep! I would pay $20 for this, but the value has to be pretty high to pay $149 when there's a huge selection of free fonts on nerdfonts.com, of which many are pretty great. Like what does this font really offer that makes it so pricey?
I bought Operator Mono circa 2020 for even more — still rocking it today. Seems like a no big deal for a thing you keep looking at for many hours every day.
kiliman/operator-mono-lig on github patches it to support ligatures. And I wish Hoefler guys added support for more languages
Video and some code screenshots: https://typography.com/blog/introducing-operator
Character set: https://typography.com/fonts/operator/overview
I'm more of a bitmap font guy (at least, as long as my eyes continue to forgive me for it) but I'm always interested to see what other fonts there are around. It does look quite nice.
I must admit when I ran across the second real paragraph from the main page, I couldn't help but only think more and more about how we will look back on marketing copy like this in a decade from now:
AI assistants produce both code and prose. MonoLisa Text renders long-form explanations with optimal readability, while MonoLisa Code keeps your code crystal clear. The perfect pairing for the AI era. (Under the title "A perfect pairing for the AI era.")
Ignoring the deep pit of sadness I felt when thinking about the incredibly long (and revolutionary) history of typefaces that led us to today for just a moment, I'm honestly curious how effective this marketing is. How many people would assume a font would be suitable for general text but not LLM-generated text and would need to be dissuaded from that notion? I wonder if someone has started selling keyboards that are "perfect for prompting" (but I'm too scared to look at this stage).
> I wonder if someone has started selling keyboards that are "perfect for prompting"
I don't know about such marketing copy, but keyboards with a "CoPilot key" are now standard, particularly on all Windows laptops, which is an even more egregious form of marketing.
The "Windows laptop special key" is a bit of a meme. Microsoft keeps changing it every few years to the new hot thing and it never catches on. It feels like "we have Command key at home".
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I think a lot of people might be excited by a typeface or other text system that would highlight tells of LLM "tainted" text.
Looks interesting.
> The Licensee may not modify, translate, adapt, alter, decompile, disassemble, decrypt, reverse engineer, change or alter the embedding bits, the font name, legal notices contained in the font software, nor seek to discover the source code of the font data, convert into another font format, create bitmaps, add or subtract any glyphs, symbols or accents, or any other derivative works based on the electronic data in this product.
This is why I haven’t bought it. I like to subset fonts to reduce the size. Any font license that prohibits this just gets ignored by me, no matter how good it is.
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Looks decent but $250 AUD for a font? Even for local and personal use? That's... a lot. I was thinking if it is paid and it was around $25 I'd consider it, then I saw the price!
Yeah, I've read the entire website, but I still don't understand how a font for programming can be worth that much.
It's something you'll be looking at for perhaps 8 hours a day for years. If you actually use it, a font is easily worth that much, even disregarding its potential use in a commercial product.
Of course, like open source software, free fonts do their best to undercut the market for individual professionals to make a living, but creating fonts isn't free.
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> MonoLisa ships as a variable font with two axes. Weight gives you every cut from Thin to Black in a single file — no megabytes per style. Grade fine-tunes typographic color by adjusting stroke thickness without changing glyph widths
If any web page designer reads this, weight 1 and grade -50 is what many web pages look like, or even thinner than that. Weight 300 and grade 0 are the lower boundary of readability IMO.
A free (as money) font with most of those properties is Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, both monospace and variable width. https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/
Thanks for this alternate!
To everbody complaining about the huge price of $149. For a font pricing thats pretty normal.
Maybe coders aren't the usual targeting group but print media is paying plenty of cash for typo licenses.
Title: "a typeface for developers"
> and now we're happy to expand the typeface with a new family called MonoLisa Text. The reasoning was to cover other use cases beyond coding with this proportional font.
Dumb question, when should a developer not use a monospaced font? I.e. when should they use MonaLisa Text
I'm sure I'm missing the obvious, but it is purely for LLM output use cases as the website implies (in which case why isn't Claude approach of using a serif font a better strategy).
Please don't take my comments are negative. Just genuinely curious, which is why I'm asking.
> Dumb question, when should a developer not use a monospaced font? I.e. when should they use MonaLisa Text
When I get back to work, I’ll try it out on my markdown editor.
Seems there's no way to disable the <= ligature without disabling whitespace ligatures? I'm not all too crazy for real ligatures but whitespace adjustments otherwise seem nice.
Also, as it's so finely adjustable, would love if they'd offer some variants for dot and comma, to increase their size, because that's my number one problem with fonts since age 45.
Can you open an issue at https://github.com/MonoLisaFont/feedback/issues ? Maybe that's something we missed while restructuring ligatures for customizability.
Saw there's an issue already about the <= ligature. Will open a second issue with feature request for bigger dots.
Created an account, to come tell you folk, just how much I love Monolisa. Have been using it every since they launched, in both my terminal, and my code editors.
It’s lovely!
editing to add: They even have PPP pricing! Which as someone living in India, I highly appreciate, since it puts a lovely piece of art within reach.
I'm in spain using DIGI (a romanian telco) - their geolocation puts me into romania and offer a 40% discount.
Anyway, still not going to pay 75€+ for a font.
20k (30$) for font for someone living in India is too much to ask.
It looks like they do pricing parity for different countries. Being in South Africa it shows a 40% discount available.
Regarding coding, the characters “:={” are all vertically centered differently.
Similar to Input Mono font, which is superior to Monolisa in pretty much any way I can think of, plus free. https://input.djr.com/
I find them quite different, to be honest. I would not call them similar at all apart from being in the same design space of fonts for displaying code.
I got so used to how narrow Iosevka is that I think I'd find it challenging to find a replacement at this point. Any other typefaces that are on the narrower side?
Bought MonoLisa back in 2022, never even considered switching coding typeface since. Before that time I used to switch every 3-6 months.
It's really well balanced easy on the eye.
The "code" version:
"Text" version:
I hate fonts that don't have a properly-formed capital "i".
Looks good. Won't ever buy a font though.
Umm... Who would pay $149 to use a font? Maybe I'm not enough of a typography nerd, but I find the free choices (JetBrains Mono, Iosevka, Fira Code, ...) quite enough.
I have used MonoLisa for a few years now as my terminal and editor font and I absolutely love it. It was a fair bit cheaper when I bought it (80 Euro IIRC), but was well-worth it!
I call all these new fonts monofonts, mono in the sense of monoculture. Aesthetics practically indistinguishable from each other. Give me one of the IBM Selectric fonts in a modern form and I'll be happy as a clam.
https://www.codingfont.com/ is a fun way to compare fonts side by side and see just how similar some of them really are. Also kind of fun to see if your favorite font makes it through a blind comparison bracket.
Is it possible to get this for free? I know there’s a free option but I don’t understand what the limits are
The free trial version has a couple of fixed weights to try. It's missing all the advanced features (variable weight etc.) but it's enough to get an impression and to use it on a daily basis to see if you like it.
I can't figure this out from the website, does the text variant have tabular figures?
I adore MonoLisa, thank you for all the effort that's gone into making it and congratulations on the new release!
I love this font. I think it is probably the only coding font I have ever actually purchased.
Same! It's also one of my favorite UNIX puns (up there with pine).
Absolutely amazing name.
In a world where Fira Code, Hack, JetBrains Mono, and like a zillion others (of equal, if not greater, quality) are offered for free, this is obviously a pure marketing play and it's sad we live in a world where even fucking fonts are so heavily monetized.
Look nice but super expensive for the normal developer. Good luck with the monetization, hope you get some company customers.
Looks lovely!
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