Iosevka is an open-source, sans-serif and slab-serif monospace font (typeof.net)

678 pointsby otobrglez14 hours ago279 comments

wartywhoa23 12 hours ago

Iosevka, my absolutely most loved font for years!

I've been using a custom version - you can customize the font¹ and build your own ttf (or better yet, ttc) using the build system supplied in the repository².

be5invis, the author of the font, deserves a special mention for creating a whole custom DSL called PatEL (Parametric Type Expression Language) to generate the font programmatically!

Renzhi, if you ever come around to read this, thank you so much for Iosevka, man!

¹https://typeof.net/Iosevka/customizer

²https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/blob/master/doc/custom-b...

nextaccountic 12 hours ago

> ttf (or better yet, ttc)

Why is ttc better?

wartywhoa23 12 hours ago

It's a package of ttfs, simpler to have all in one file on disk as well as install from one. Customization can generate a lot of font varieties.

JdeBP 12 hours ago

That explains all of the .ptl source files, which I didn't recognize straightaway.

brzz 9 hours ago

Would be curious to see your custom version

wartywhoa23 8 hours ago

Here you go:

https://pastebin.com/WwYY0QqX

Copy and paste into Import Configuration at https://typeof.net/Iosevka/customizer to preview.

z0ltan 9 hours ago

Testing whether I am shadow-banned. If you see this message, could you just acknowledge the same?

wartywhoa23 8 hours ago

I see you, my friend!

z0ltan 7 hours ago

Thank you! Being shadow-banned is worse than being banned :D.

mcbuilder 9 hours ago

Same, I went from being die hard Terminus fan to this. Been a long time daily driver.

ilvez 8 hours ago

Yep. :waves: to ones on similar path.. Switching off from Terminus was hard, but eventually unavoidable. Switched to Jetbrains Mono when Ghostty came out nearly 2 years ago..

durdn 7 hours ago

oh man I used Terminus for so long till my finger hurt ... recently I was very happy with Cascadia Mono but now I've migrated to (as I was saying in another thread) Pragmasevka (derivative of Iosevka that mimics Pragmata Pro). It's really great.

goatking 7 hours ago

I am happy it works for you. I am always surprised how much this font is praised, then I try it, and just completely unreadable for me.

I tried it again, quickly set it up in my terminal the "Iosevka Term" version, switching from Jetbrains Mono, and just don't understand how can people read this.

16bitvoid 7 hours ago

I'm also not a fan of the narrow width, but there is an "extended" width version that's more like other mono fonts, which is what I personally use, albeit customized.

bayindirh 7 hours ago

I drove a version of this for a fairly long time, remembering downloading it from GitHub page, not from the customizer. It's not a bad font by any means. I enjoyed Iosevka a lot while I used it.

But, after using Berkeley Mono for three minutes, I switched to it everywhere in a week or so, and never looked back, or looked anywhere else, to be precise.

Yes, it's not free, and yes it's opinionated. I can say that my opinions align with that font pretty much. It's one of the things which I cherish like an expensive hand tool which really does its job very well and makes you happy with its presence.

[0]: https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono

cdaringe 7 hours ago

wow i love it! 225 bucks for a font though is bonkers

bayindirh 7 hours ago

I first bought it for $75, then the updates came. I also got them when they came out, but I don't remember the price.

You can start with $75 package and work your way up if you feel like you need them.

psolidgold 6 hours ago

If you like Berkeley Mono but don't want to pay, here's an Iosevka configuration that attempts to mimic it as closely as possible. https://ahatem.github.io/IoskeleyMono/

riedel 4 hours ago

What am I missing: here it lists as SIL OFL [0]

[0] https://www.programmingfonts.org/#iosevka

seanw444 4 hours ago

They're referring to Berkeley, not Iosevka.

riedel 4 hours ago

Thanks! Should have read more carefully. To make things more confusing there seems to be IoskeleyMono as free alternative btw [0]

[0] https://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono

astrolx 7 hours ago

Funny enough I paid for Berkeley Mono but its italic is just not up to it (and particularly not to the price). Iosevka Mono has very nice glyphs but just way too narrow for my taste. JetBrains Mono, IBM Plex Mono (or Lilex) or Roboto Mono just seem to work much better for my tired eyes !

bayindirh 7 hours ago

Fair enough. With super-compiler add-on, I believe you can adjust the angle of the italics.

I faintly remember about the though process of italics, but I don't remember it now. They don't look uncomfortable to me, anyway.

psolidgold 6 hours ago

Here's an Iosevka config that mimics Berkeley Mono for those who don't want to or can't pay money for it. https://ahatem.github.io/IoskeleyMono/

bayindirh 6 hours ago

Wow. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, indeed.

BaudouinVH 6 hours ago

Wow. So Gorgeous ! Thanks for sharing this

ErroneousBosh 2 hours ago

Looks like the daisywheel typeface that one of the old ACT Sirius Ones at my dad's old work used to use.

bayindirh an hour ago

It's designed to look like a font from that era, to be honest. It also reminds me some of the older computers I used. Some typewriter, maybe a real VT320 or the older DOS systems I used.

It's a modern yet period correct version of these older fonts, with proper character set support and love for details. It's so perfect for me, it becomes invisible, or as the Berkeley's page says: "It's boring. It's good"*.

Or as I mailed the creator after using it a couple of weeks: "It's so perfect that it transported all my computers to 70s, in a good way".

*: When I was writing this comment, I wondered whether I really set my browser's monospace font to Berkeley. It becomes that transparent after a while.

para_parolu 7 hours ago

Iosevka is very configurable and have many options for font and individual glyphs. Build supports text file config. At some point I made a config so I can always get preferred setup. It works well for me

skrebbel 7 hours ago

Give it a week

gorgoiler 6 hours ago

A huge helping of praise gets lumped onto Iosevka, from me, for the way it is defined in a custom S-expression DSL.

https://github.com/be5invis/PatEL

It’s a real hackers typeface.

nvme0n1p1 6 hours ago

The reason it's so popular is it was (one of?) the first fonts to include tons of programming ligatures. So it gained mindshare early, and since font choices are so personal, the more people use a font, the more people will like and post about it.

JasonSage 6 hours ago

Once, I also couldn't fathom how people liked this one.

When I asked, somebody said it fits more characters in terminals and code editors. This sounds incredibly obvious, but for whatever reason that was eye-opening for me and helped me appreciate it a lot more when I tried it again. Now I can't use anything else.

Perz1val 5 hours ago

Truth is it requires getting used to, I don't even notice it's narrow anymore, but it was so painful throughout the first day

altairprime 5 hours ago

To suggest an odd thing, you might try repeating your tests with the customized set to a single weight — either higher or lower than the default 500 that most programs would use. Berkeley for high-PPI displays is at 450 rather than 500 and looks better for it. (I’m on the Berkeley ship and there are flaws in Iosevka that would see me select Monaco over it, but I’m also a fan of For Science™.)

gjvc 23 minutes ago

Jetbrains Mono Thin and Roboto Condensed make an excellent pair.

vbernat 4 hours ago

I love it as I can customize it to match the metrics and weights of my main font on web pages. See here for me: https://github.com/vincentbernat/vincent.bernat.ch/blob/main....

sombragris 3 hours ago

Iosevka and its family are a true masterpiece. I used it as my main primary monospaced font since it's so clean and pleasing to the eye.

I now switched to Ioskeley Mono, which is an Iosevka configuration made to look similar to Berkeley Mono:

https://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono

Either the Iosevka originals or Ioskeley are gorgeous fonts. I'm grateful to its creator.

jve 12 hours ago

Is it only me but I really dislike "Code Ligations"? I have to mark some chars to count how many consecutive "=" simbols there are... or \/ looking like V without having other chars near it to distinguish. Having to copy paste diamond shape to find out it is <>. arrows with squiggly tails, /> being ugly, <. having dot in the middle...

That could be the maximum I'd like out of font to have "proper" greater/less-equal sign.

semiquaver 11 hours ago

ligatures, not ligations

efilife 11 hours ago

Interestingly, they are called ligations on the submitted website

swiftcoder 10 hours ago

"ligation" is the verb-form (i.e. making something with/into ligatures).

I'm not sure however that the verb form makes all that much sense in the context the website uses it...

masfuerte 10 hours ago

English is great at exceptions, but I'm nearly sure anything ending in -ation is a noun. Ligation certainly is.

Ligation is (among other things) the act of applying a ligature. So it does make sense.

unfunco 7 hours ago

Ration can be a verb.

swiftcoder 6 hours ago

Yes, technically it is a deverbal noun, but I couldn't put my finger on that term at the time

Freak_NL 10 hours ago

I have no idea why they chose 'ligation' instead of just ligature, but it was jarring every time I encountered it.

slazaro 11 hours ago

They always seemed to me like solutions to a nonexistent problem. They make the code less readable, but ligatures exist and they seemed like a cool tech thing to implement, and they might look cool in screenshots. But in practice, in my opinion, they're worse than just having the normal characters. But I guess it's a matter of opinion, no harm in other people using them.

yayachiken 11 hours ago

We have studies since ages ago that consistency in code style is one of the most important requirements for code quality.

This goes down to the details like that you should either use spaces over tabs OR prescribe editor config such that the code looks similar on each machine.

Of course this doesn't automatically mean that code ligatures are harmful, but I would be quite wary of using them. At the very least it introduces some friction, not sure if the arguably lower mental load of using real mathematical symbols instead of the ASCII symbols makes up for it.

jve 9 hours ago

I'v been coding now for like 15 years and I'm not old enought to understand the debate between spaces vs tabs :)

I guess my IDE choices never surface the issue for me... visually they just look the same. I cannot say which codebase uses spaces which uses tabs. I never even think about it. I just smash tab character and don't care that there have been spaces. Or enter or { and IDE does the indentation. I just choose not to press space 2-4-8-16 times in a row.

Now I hope I won't get bulldozed over by HN crowd...

Sharlin 9 hours ago

Well, the tabs vs spaces had been mostly resolved and spaces won. But obviously it was never about what physical keys to press, nobody on the spaces side would spam the space bar to indent stuff (except maybe in the unfortunate situations of having to use an editor with no choice of setting the tabulator to emit spaces, or a textfield in a non-editor UI where the tabulator cycles the focus instead).

godshatter 8 hours ago

I'm still in the "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment" camp. If you adhere to it, it makes your code look nice on any tab size.

matltc 8 hours ago

Typing formulas in Excel

It's too bad spaces won, tabs is just correct I think, since one can configure the tabstop to use any indent size they would like. I'm quite tired of reading 2-space indent. Seems everything has moved this way now except python. I'm even seeing C with it, which is especially jarring. I think the languages that use braces for indentation particularly need 4. Python needs it least, and I can read Ruby because its blocks are delimited by words and it's bad style to write long methods

Sharlin 7 hours ago

Agreed, four is optimal and has luckily been the standard in projects I’ve worked in. Encourages you to avoid deep nesting as well.

strenholme 9 hours ago

Spaces vs. tabs causes a lot of issues for Python programmers who share their code with other programmers. The other place where spaces vs. tabs is an issue is with makefiles, probably one of the most annoying features of POSIX.

dunham 5 hours ago

I also remember old school bourne shell wanting tabs in some places (case statements?), but bash doesn't have that issue.

These days, I try avoid them outside of makefiles.

strenholme 3 hours ago

Considering the way `/bin/sh` had a bunch of different implementations before POSIX standardization minimized that in the mid-1990s, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of those distinguished spaces from tabs.

That said, the original UNIX V7 implementation of /bin/sh didn’t distinguish different kinds of whitespace:

https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/bourne/v7/

yayachiken 8 hours ago

One of the main arguments for tabs over spaces was always that people wanted to configure how much space a level of indentation makes up on screen.

With tabs pretty much every editor except something like notepad.exe could do it since ancient times, with spaces the editor needs to do a bit more processing, so you were a bit more restricted in editor choice, if you really were bothered so much by the indents chosen in the project.

So it is actually quite similar to the ligature discussion. It would be good if the code looked the same for everybody but now instead of saying "But 8-space indents waste so much space on the screen :(" some people now go "But I don't like seeing things like != or -> instead of modern Unicode symbols :("

StableAlkyne 7 hours ago

I'm in the same boat, I always just press tab and let my IDE or text editor fill in with N spaces.

Granted, I'm also someone who heavily encourages the use of Black as the Python formatter in projects I'm on, specifically because it has no configurable options - can't have a holy war about formats if nothing can be changed.

chrisweekly 7 hours ago

> "understand the debate between spaces vs tabs"

The reason spaces won is that it's not (spaces) vs (tabs), it's (spaces) vs (tabs AND spaces).

drob518 6 hours ago

Oh, for Pete’s sake. The bodies from this holy war are barely cool…

Perz1val 5 hours ago

They don't detract from readability for me, so it's just pretty symbols = me more happy

wildrhythms 11 hours ago

I hate them. I disable them in every code editor. I don't need to have to guess if it's a double equals or a triple equals

throwuxiytayq 9 hours ago

Some fonts use three lines to draw a triple equals ligature. That, and it is, well, triple long. I’ve never had any problems with distinguishing anything with ligatures. They’re nice to look at, and very easy to read once you’re used to them. Skill issue, guys.

doodpants 7 hours ago

The job of a font is to show me the text as it actually is. I shouldn't need to use a "skill" to decode what I'm looking at.

throwuxiytayq 6 hours ago

It is common knowledge among most - if not all - civilizations that you do, in fact, need to learn to read in order to know how to read.

Anyway, since you want a direct representation of the text - presumably, you configured your editor to render EOL sequences explicitly, to distinguish tabs from spaces, etc?

apetrovic 11 hours ago

I like them and use them. But every editor I worked with has an option to disable ligatures.

voidUpdate 11 hours ago

I wish editors had the option to disable certain ligatures. I use jetbrains mono, and the >> ligature breaks bracket highlighting in visual studio, making them both the same colour

mkesper 11 hours ago

The 'fixed' variant disables them.

Semaphor 11 hours ago

Common complaint.

Personally, I like them. They look pleasing and I never had issues distinguishing between the ligatures for ==, ===, and = itself.

WesolyKubeczek 10 hours ago

Code ligatures look like the final desperate attempt of an aging hipster, a Ruby on Rails and Web2.0 early adoptr (sic), the type to wear thick-rimmed fake glasses and a scarf in the middle of summer, to be cool, as he is riding his old Segway, with a glass of soy latte in one hand and an avocado toast in the other, into the void of oblivion.

I don't like them because I never know what they actually stand for in ASCII.

ragnese 10 hours ago

I thought I was the only one! I figured I was either crazy or getting old and stuck in my ways. The first I'm I saw a font with them, I thought it was cool and tried it out. I almost immediately hated it. I've tried a few more times for varying lengths of time, and I've decided that I really do hate them.

bita_nidir 10 hours ago

I logged into HN to upvote your comment. Code Ligations are an absolute abomination.

pmontra 9 hours ago

It's not only you.

boltzmann64 9 hours ago

I used to hate font ligatures until I discovered Commit Mono (my all time favorite monospace font). They use the ligatures only to adjust spacing and make it look better on a monospace grid. No stupid <=, -> ligatures or anything else.

kps 9 hours ago

Yeah, Unicode shipped 35 years ago. If you want a ≠ then use a ≠.

rob74 8 hours ago

Then you just need a programming language that accepts ≠ as a synonym of !=. But who knows, maybe there is already one?

cogburnd02 7 hours ago

Or just pipe your source through a sed script that replaces one with the other before compiling/running.

drob518 6 hours ago

Yes, but why?

daotoad 6 hours ago

Rakulang has you covered.

It is aggressive in its unicode support. You want to use vulgar fractions? Or Mayan numerals? They'll work. You want to use mathematical notation like ∈? It works.

You can literally do this:

`my $var = ⅒ + 2 + Ⅻ;`

https://docs.raku.org/language/unicode_ascii

kps 6 hours ago

Julia example: https://juliamono.netlify.app/#fnref:zscode

I can't include an example here because VC News strips out math.

altairprime 5 hours ago

Mostly it strips out ‘math variable names that jerks would use to embolden their spam headlines for emphasis’, which is indeed annoying and results in this:

∂ₓₙ = [(₁ ⊗ ʹ) (₂ ⊗ ʹ) ( ⊗ ₁) ( ⊗ ₂)]

And last I checked, BPL is in the same boat.

F3nd0 5 hours ago

I wish more languages other than Raku did this. But no, not equal is written as surprised equal. And if something ought to be less or equal, you have to write a fat arrow pointing left. :/

eviks 5 hours ago

But languages are made by older or less progressive people, so of course you can't use ≠ Unicode in your language enforcing ascii

sicktriple 8 hours ago

Ligatures suck. That's what Iosevka Fixed is for.

strenholme 8 hours ago

I have used Fontforge to remove all ligatures from a programming font; e.g. my monospace font of choice is a aggressively subsetted variant of Fira Code with no ligatures whatsoever.

https://github.com/samboy/CaulixtlaFonts/tree/main/MiscFonts...

seanw444 4 hours ago

Can't you just use the font feature flags?

strenholme 3 hours ago

In a lot of places, no.

For example, ligatures in Fira Code cannot be disabled when using the Cygwin terminal in Windows (mintty). In that application, for example, “===” looks like three continuous long lines atop each other in Fira Code, with no way to make it look like three equal signs again.

seanw444 2 hours ago

Fair enough

green7ea 2 hours ago

Isn't FiraCode without the ligatures just FiraMono?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fira_(typeface)

strenholme an hour ago

There are some notable improvements, most visibly the slash in 0.

From https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

“Fira Code is not only about ligatures. Some fine-tuning is done for punctuation and frequent letter pairs.” Note that without ligature support, a lot of that fine tuning is lost.

graypegg 7 hours ago

I personally like them because (to me) it makes a few symbols less ambiguous. (I use Victor Mono [0], so in my mind things like == and === in that font makes mistakes more obvious to me at least.)

But also... I know I have the minority opinion on this. It absolutely should be opt-in, not opt-out. I think the past decade, I've been told the font tweaks I enable are incomprehensable to everyone I work with. The way I like my IDE fonts is far outside the bell curve (ligatures, cursive variants for some syntax, proportional variants for prose) so the fact that most new monospace code-focused fonts seem to align with my opinions should be concerning to font makers! I like that I don't have to patch a different font's italics into my code font anymore, but common sense says I SHOULD still have to do that!

[0] https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono#ligatures

doodpants 7 hours ago

You and me both. Ligatures are a solution to a problem that monospaced fonts don't have. I don't mind if a mono font uses ligatures to harmonize character spacing/alignment a little bit. But I don't want things like a "proper" greater/less-equal sign; if a font goes so far as to replace >= with ≥, then it's lying to me about what characters are actually present in the file.

xondono 6 hours ago

They’re “lying” as much as any other character is “lying”.

F3nd0 5 hours ago

Care to elaborate? I don’t see what you mean at all.

rbanffy 5 hours ago

The VT-340 didn't support ligatures, therefore, we shouldn't use them ;-)

Now, seriously, a programming font has no (and should never have) awareness of the computer language it's representing. Ligatures make sense if they present meaning in a way easier to read than the non-combined characters. I can't type := in APL and expect the REPL to think it's an attribution arrow (←).

I get APL is a rather extreme language to talk about, but this is one example where ligatures would harm the programmer (unless your editor replaces a ":=" with a "←"). Source code is a very precise language and the choice of characters you use matters a lot. A "<-" doesn't mean "←" unless the language declares so.

cloverich 5 hours ago

They are in the tabs vs spaces camp. Choose your preference and walk away, silently. Unless you consider yourself a Real Programmer, in that case, fight to the death about the matter.

(...I also find them annoying to look at, idk why)

spiderice 4 hours ago

This is brought up in every single thread about fonts that have code ligatures. So no, of course it isn't just you.

nsvd2 3 hours ago

I love them. I suppose it's personal preference

oefrha 13 hours ago

IMO a font specimen site may be the worst place to use font-display: swap. Was wondering why I was looking at what seemed indistinguishable from Courier, turns out what I saw was exactly Courier.

embedding-shape 11 hours ago

For those not in the know (or who didn't suffer through having to write CSS manually): font-display: swap changes the default behavior from "No text visible until font been loaded" to "Display fallback font until specified font is available", meaning you'll see Courier until Iosevka loaded properly, or Courier forever if the font file failed to load.

I'm guessing the website author added that after some "website performance tool" recommended it, as they make sweeping generalizations that don't always make sense in every context, and "always add font-display: swap so text is readable earlier" is now a dogmatic rule "web developers" (mechanical or wetware ones) add without thinking, so that precious performance number goes up.

Freak_NL 10 hours ago

I was wondering why it did that. This is really the kind of site where this is not a feature you should use.

kqp 10 hours ago

I think the dogmatism stems from Google, which delivers this advice as unconditional instruction and often gets parroted, makes the main website grading tool that calls it an error, and says they’ll drive less traffic to you if their grading tool rates you poorly.

Also, I think also led by Google, `font-display: block;` actually behaves the same as swap now, just with a longer wait for the font to load [1]. Iosevka’s webpage does use swap, though.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...

Sharlin 9 hours ago

Funny. Last I heard everyone wanted to specifically prevent the behavior of showing unstyled content before assets are loaded.

jrmg 9 hours ago

On my iPad, I’m pretty sure Fira Code and IBM Plex in the example box are displaying as Courier. They’re certainly both identical.

dmtroyer 8 hours ago

was also confused...

pimlottc 6 hours ago

I had thought that was an intentional animation to show the different weights and variants

needfish 11 hours ago

I have a custom build of this font, use it everywhere now. One thing is that the width by default is too compact and the extended is too wide for my taste. Upon searching I found somebody's build that has width 576. I don't know why that number, but I used it in my current builds and it turns out pretty much perfect for terminal use for me, just wide enough.

The hookiest tail for lowercase l man, love it.

Even for my own website, with some tighter tracking and it can work okay as a text font.

Another great customizable font is Maple Mono [0]

[0] https://font.subf.dev/en/

asa123 11 hours ago

Sometimes I catch myself assuming hacker news is representative of the general population and then I read comments like these

(I am excited to try this out)

frazer2669 10 hours ago

Re: Width -- Same, default is too narrow and extended is too wide for my taste. The custom build has a default "semi-extended" which is just right for me and has a width of 548. Again no clue why that number, but if Iosevka says that is right then it is :) I do see that when I switch between semi-extended and a "regular" font like Cascadia Code that they seem to be the exact same width.

twalla 7 hours ago

The default spacing is too narrow for my liking but what's really cool is in the amount of customization that's possible, including lookalikes of some popular paid programming fonts (I'm partial to Iosvmata).

https://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono

https://github.com/shytikov/pragmasevka

https://github.com/N-R-K/Iosvmata

GCUMstlyHarmls 12 hours ago

First time I used Iosevka I felt really nauseated, kind of like getting motion sickness, it was a really bizarre experience for a font to give me. I was on a smaller screen though and getting some more characters in without getting tiny was actually a selling point, so I gave it another go and eventually got over the feeling.

Now (after ... gosh, 6, 7, 8? years probably) I love it, use it everywhere and other monospace font feels super w i d e and weird.

seabass an hour ago

Iosevka is one of those fonts you can tell has had so much work put into it over the years. It is so customizable and works in a lot of contexts, although it’s a little narrow to code in for my taste. I’ve really liked Junicode (serif) for the same reason. Lots of customization options and care in the details.

TwoFerMaggie 13 hours ago

Have been using it for a couple years. Before that I was using Fira Code/Mono which was also fantastic. However, once I got used to the condensed Iosevka, all the other fonts just felt loose and not space efficient enough in my IDE and terminal.

aziis98 13 hours ago

Exactly the same for me! I love it for the terminal especially

code-blooded 11 hours ago

I am the opposite. I have CommitMono, Iosevka, Source Code Pro installed, but I always come back to Fira Code/Mono. At the same overall density of text, I find that I can skim through the text faster when the font is wider.

It's interesting how personal font choice (among many other things) is!

Daneel_ 9 hours ago

I know it's a ridiculous thing to say, but the fact that I can customise the font so well on the website only to then not be able to download it like that is a crime. I don't want to muck about with npm just to build a font - do it on the site! /rant

Daneel_ 9 hours ago

Well, I was able to do it fairly simply online via github actions with the help of chatgpt.

Chat history (excuse the lazily-constructed prompt): https://chatgpt.com/share/6acf829b-5428-83ec-939c-acbc7805a3...

johnisom2001 7 hours ago

> fairly simply online via github actions with the help of chatgpt

This is exactly what he's talking about. It's not one-click

miqkt 12 hours ago

My go-to monospace font in everything I use nowadays. Way back, it used to be JetBrains Mono. When I decided to give Iosevka a try, I actually started with the expanded variant, because I wasn't accustomed to the narrow jump. Took a while, but at some point I took that jump back to the default and it's stuck. Thanks for your efforts on this font Renzhi!

dang 5 hours ago

Iosevka typeface for code, from code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36785409 - July 2023 (76 comments)

Iosevka – Versatile typeface for code, from code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30014796 - Jan 2022 (36 comments)

Iosevka, Version 3.0.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23230929 - May 2020 (40 comments)

Iosevka – A Typeface for Code, from Code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14009963 - April 2017 (122 comments)

Show HN: Iosevka Open Source Programming Typeface - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9951989 - July 2015 (27 comments)

(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)

aleyan 7 hours ago

I have been using a union of Iosevka for most characters and Source Han Sans for CJK characters called Sarasa Gothic[0] for my roguelike (HexWalker)[1]. Iosevka's narrow characters are what originally inspired me to do it. Two Iosevka half-width glyphs literally form a square in the terminal, and if off-set by one characters, can be used to emulate a pointy-side up hexgrid in the terminal. In the end my love for the Iosevka letter shapes made me build HexWalker for the web, because it is easier to set custom fonts there than in the terminal.

If you want to use Iosevka on your webpage there is a variant on google fonts called Iosevka Charon[2] that is really easy to use.

Personally, I use filtered version of Iosevka that just contains the characters and variants I need for my personal website. For HexWalker I filter Sarasa Term to the characters I used, which takes it down to 42kb from 50mb+.

[0] https://github.com/be5invis/sarasa-gothic

[1] https://ytirnity.com/games/hexwalker

[2] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Iosevka+Charon

iwixon 7 hours ago

Emacs heads will know Prot. Mandatory shout out to his Iosevka customized version Aporetic [0], previously called 'Iosevka Comfy', which has become my daily driver.

[0] https://github.com/protesilaos/aporetic

makizar 11 hours ago

I’ve used Iosevka for years but recently switched to Commit Mono [0]. It hits all the right spots for me, is customizable, and does smart kerning which is neat.

[0] https://commitmono.com/

tcdent 8 hours ago

Hadn't seen this one yet, but that's exactly the type of sensibility I personally prefer in a monospace (Menlo has remained my daily driver for years).

F3nd0 5 hours ago

The font might be nice, but that website makes it exceptionally hard to read, so I can’t really say.

divbzero 4 hours ago

Iosevka is also available in Nerd Fonts. https://www.nerdfonts.com/#features

durdn 11 hours ago

A friend pointed me to a derivative of Iosevka that tries to mimic the historical (and commercially licensed) Pragmata Pro and the result is an insanely great font I've migrated to recently: https://github.com/shytikov/pragmasevka

tkdb 5 hours ago

Are we in a font renaissance?

Why are there so many new awesome projects like this?

I'm not complaining, just trying to understand what drives the creation of open source fonts.

TrainedMonkey 5 hours ago

It is almost like there is a cool new technology that makes shipping projects faster.

Zizizizz 5 hours ago

Iosevka is very old

brzz 5 hours ago

This project is over a decade old fyi

real_faxenoff 3 hours ago

The font looks pretty good, and its compactness seems promising. But with my low screen resolution and high-contrast color scheme, it starts to strain my eyes when reading large blocks of text.

I tried various fonts and settled on Martian Mono VF (https://github.com/evilmartians/mono). At a width of 0.6, it’s quite comfortable to read.

hualapais 5 hours ago

I adhered to and finished out my tech career with APL385:

https://apl385.com/fonts/

…IBM Plex and Iosevka were in the running, but the subtle “Comic Sans” effect of the APL font make the code easier to scan, subjectively speaking.

drmr 4 hours ago

To be very honest: this hurts my eyes

Maybe it's because I'm just too used to DejaVu Sans Mono Book, but I couldn't use this as a daily driver at all.

Luckily we can all have our terminals the way we want :)

jiffygist 37 minutes ago

What's the origin of the name?

nylonstrung 2 hours ago

It's a nice font but the nix package constantly gets reupdated and forces a new build instead of going through binary caches for some reason.

I uninstalled it specifically because it was slowing down my updates and builds

joarv0249nw 9 hours ago

Why is it called sans-serif when there is serif on i j etc?

dcss_gardener 9 hours ago

It's a descriptive label of the general lineage the designer considers their font to be in, not an ISO spec.

A little bit of looseness here is a pretty strong signal for careful font design actually. It means the creator considered some other factor (in this case char disambiguation) to be more important than rigid adherence to the category.

oskdosjfiejfj 4 hours ago

Or, to put it in a way that doesn’t make you sound like a complete ass: serif characters are the exception, so this is considered a sans-serif font.

starquake 12 hours ago

The default font since GNOME 48 is Adwaita Sans (a modified Inter with different l's and I's) and for monospace it is Adwaita Mono (a modified Iosevka.)

I like it a lot!

Scoring6931 4 hours ago

Took them long enough to change!

Both Inter and Iosevka are gorgeous fonts.

Cantarell was so, so ugly.

cik 13 hours ago

I have been using this font for 3 years now. I can't, and won't get off it. I use it wherever I can - heck there's an Arch package! I'm pleasantly surprised by how much something this simple makes me happy. Legitimately a font has added to my life.

slow_typist 12 hours ago

Thanks, I couldn’t spot a license on the website, but existence of an arch package does probably mean the license is okayish.

JdeBP 12 hours ago

Go and read the source code on the GitHub repository that the page links to as "Downloads". There's a LICENSE.md there, and a fair amount besides.

jve 11 hours ago

As we are using hypertext, I thought it would be useful to throw a link in here... but following your instructions feels like navigating a paper map. I don't see LICENSE.md here: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/releases

But alright, I realized you must download the archive to find LICENSE.md in there: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/archive/refs/tags/v34.9....

The license is "SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1." from http://scripts.sil.org/OFL

petiepooo 10 hours ago

or drop the releases and go to just https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka where LICENSE.md file shows up.