Monospace Font Favorites

July 26, 2016 20:11 / desktop fonts linux / 0 comments

For the past six months or so, I've been experimenting with a variety of monospace fonts in a quest to find the perfect coding font. While I haven't found a clear winner, I have found a dozen nice-looking fonts and learned a lot about typefaces in general. I've also learned quite a bit about font rendering on Linux, which I hope to summarize in a separate post soon.

In this post I'd like to share some screenshots (or "swatches") of my favorite fonts.

The screenshots presented below were generated using a little bash script that opened a terminal, sets the font, prints some colored text, then takes a screenshot. It looks a bit like this:

#!/bin/bash

font="$1"
size="$2"
urxvt \
  -fn "xft:$font:size=$size" \
  -geometry 50x18 \
  -e /bin/bash \
  -c "demo-text && echo "$font $size" && sleep 0.5 && scrot -u '$font.png' && sleep 0.5"

TrueType fonts

The following fonts are rendered with autohinting disabled, medium hinting, no subpixel rendering, lcddefault filter. For example, here are the relevant settings for "Agave" at 11 points:

$ fc-match -v "Agave-11"
        ...
    antialias: True(w)
    hintstyle: 2(i)(w)
    hinting: True(w)
    autohint: False(w)
    rgba: 5(i)(w)
    lcdfilter: 1(i)(w)
        ...

Here is how these settings look when zoomed in:

Note how, by disabling subpixel rendering, there are no bizarre colors showing up that would lead to color fringing. I also found that using slight hinting would cause some fonts to appear too fuzzy, while full hinting robbed the glyphs of their unique character -- so I settled on medium and have been happy with the results.

Agave

Agave is bundled with some other nice fonts as part of the codeface project.

Ahamono

Available for free on gumroad

Anka/Coder Normal and Condensed

Available for free at fontlibrary.org.

Apercu

More information here.

ASM Regular

Available at myfonts.com.

BPMono

Available for free at backpacker.gr.

Bront

Available for free on GitHub.

CamingoCode

Available at myfonts.com.

Consola Mono

Available for free at fontsup.com.

Courier Prime Sans

Available for free at quoteunquoteapps.com. Be sure to check out Courier Prime Code as well.

DecimaMono Pro

Available at myfonts.com.

Ecocoding

Available at myfonts.com.

Envy Code R

Available for free on the designer's website.

Fantasque Sans Mono

Available for free on GitHub.

Hermit

Available for free on the designer's website.

Input Mono Narrow

Available for free at fontbureau.com.

Iosevka Term

Available for free on GitHub.

Luculent

Available for free on the designer's website.

Available for free here.

M+ 1mn

Available for free here.

Monaco

Monofur

Available for free on the designer's website.

Mononoki

Available for free on GitHub.

MonoOne (predecessor to Mononoki)

Available for free on GitHub.

Monospace Typewriter

Available for free on fontsquirrel.com.

MS Gothic

NittiPX

Available on boldmonday.com.

Operator Mono

Available on typography.com.

Pointfree

Available for free on dafont.com.

Pragmata Pro

Available on fsd.it.

Profont (Windows version)

Available for free on the designer's website.

SV Basic Manual

Available for free on dafont.com.

Ubuntu Mono

Available for free at font.ubuntu.com.

Vivala Code

Available on myfonts.com.

Bitmap Fonts

Bitmap fonts require no special rendering as they fit perfectly into the pixel grid. If I zoom way in, you can see that everything lines up:

Available for free on dafont.com.

Envypn

Available for free in this GitHub repo.

Gohufont

Available for free at font.gohu.org.

Tamsyn

Available for free on the designer's website.

Tamsyn-Modified

Tamzen

Terminus

Available for free on sourceforge, ew.

Termsyn

Available for free on GitHub.

Toggle between the various "Tamsyn" fonts

Click the font sample below to toggle between the three "Tamsyn" font styles:

Thanks for reading

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I hope you found a couple new fonts to try out in your editor. If you're looking for more fonts, I recommend checking out the following GitHub projects:

To learn more about font rendering on Linux, I recommend starting with the Arch wiki. Freetype looks to be changing some things up in the 2.7.0 release, including subpixel hinting ("ClearType"), so keep an eye out for it.

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