I know some people might want to modify or tweak the project to their liking. The project is meant to provide a Python sandbox more than just font files, so feel free to fork it or submit a PR if you feel like some glyphs need tweaking! You don't need any external tools to draw/visualize the glyphs.
Nordwand Mono – A monospace font for coders and adventurers (github.com)
534 pointsby noriax862 days ago147 comments
tywr 13 hours ago
Wow, I didn't really expect to see my project there this morning! I'm normally a simple lurker, but I wanted to say thanks for the kind words about the project.
bayindirh 13 hours ago
The font looks great and has its own character, kudos!
However, it doesn't support all the characters I need, so I can't use it as a terminal font. However, I starred your repo, and will watch it.
Thanks again for the effort, it looks really nice.
GreenWatermelon 11 hours ago
If you're talking about powerline/nerd symbols, have you tried patching it yourself? I did and it worked.
bayindirh 10 hours ago
Unfortunately no, ligatures/nerd fonts/powerline is not in my concerns list. It doesn't support all the characters all my alphabet. This is the showstopper.
Normally, I use Berkeley, but I have a couple of terminal profiles with different fonts which I use if I open 5+ terminals sometimes, to group things. I wondered whether I can use this one of the alternate fonts when things get complicated and crowded.
emsixteen 9 hours ago
Just for clarity, the characters I need are æ/ø/å, and this is only missing the å. A little funny, given the font's called Nordwand :D
Looks really nice though. :)
bayindirh 8 hours ago
For me it's missing ğ, Ğ, ş, Ş, ı and İ. Being a Turkish is interesting sometimes. :)
Melatonic 5 hours ago
Aren't those also used in Polish names or similar ? Always found the regional variation and whatnot super interesting
bayindirh 4 hours ago
Some languages have interesting variations on S, C, O and Z (there might be more, I'm not a keen linguist). However, the accents are not always the same. I also believe that nobody has "ğ/Ğ", and I'm pretty sure that nobody has "ı/İ" pair.
The second one wreaks havoc on many, many systems. e.g.: It was breaking Kodi completely (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/19883#issuecomment-86833...), and I have personally wrapped many software packages with locale change scripts to make them run.
For more information: https://blog.codinghorror.com/whats-wrong-with-turkey/
0rzech 2 hours ago
Polish diacritics are: ą ć ę ł ń ó ś ź ż (uppercase: Ą Ć Ę Ł Ń Ó Ś Ź Ż). They are all separate letters.
By the way, many people think that the Polish alphabet [1] is just English with diacritics, but in reality neither q, nor v, nor x are part of it.
throwaway2046 13 hours ago
Seeing as your font is OFL, you might like to submit it to Google Fonts. That would make it so much easier for devs to include on their webpages and other media.
herrherrmann 13 hours ago
Google Fonts is no longer best practice due to worse performance and privacy (and the questionable ethics of giving stuff to Google for free) compared to self-hosted fonts. So, OP should take this suggestion with a grain of salt.
echoangle 13 hours ago
You don’t need to use google fonts as a CDN, but I think a lot of people use google fonts to look for fonts they then download and self-host.
tgv 13 hours ago
It is a great place to find fonts. I download them and serve them from our own platform, to avoid precisely the privacy issues.
tgv 13 hours ago
It looks nice. The rounded square, boxy shape has a 70s feel to it. The 'm' bugs me a bit, and the <>, but I'm going to use it in my IDE for a while.
Edit: I'm quite fond of the 'k'.
tasuki 12 hours ago
The `m` is wonderful!
brzz 10 hours ago
Agreed. I think it brings the font so much more character
NewsaHackO 10 hours ago
Yea the m is quite off, I know nothing about fonts but the middle tinge is too long, or it’s too symmetric, the right corner is too sharp or something. And it is repeated so much in the example text that works against it.
cdelsolar 9 hours ago
the k is amazing.
agilek 12 hours ago
Hey, how did you designed the typeface using Python? Asking ad a designer who thought Python is a programming language…
tywr 11 hours ago
When you design a glyph inside any vector graphics software, you are essentially asking a library to execute some commands (eg. place a point there, then place the bézier curve handles there and go to next point etc.). Instead of relying on a software with a UI, I directly called the underlying commands from python for every glyph.
agilek 9 hours ago
Thanks - got this part but did you actually design all letters one by one, or did you just feed it with all the fonts you mentioned as inspiration and YOLO? Can’t imagine how to give feedback to the curves when they live in the code and are not visualised…
brookst 8 hours ago
If the designed used an LLM, it’s easy to say “no, make the dot on the i slightly elliptical, and round the bottom left corner of the B a tiny bit more”, etc.
I’m doing lots of CAD work this way, where previously I’d be drawing in rhino but not operating from durable product briefs.
tywr 4 hours ago
With this project I have an easy way to visualize individual glyphs on which I'm working. My workflow was to simply edit the glyph code itself, tweaking the formulas or functions and instantly plot it to see how it would look like.
phplovesong 10 hours ago
Im going to give this a go. Im using berkeley mono, so this is up my alley. What colorscheme are you using in the examples? I tend to find that font + colorscheme goes hand in hand.
katspaugh 9 hours ago
What a beautiful font! Thanks so much for open-sourcing it!
giancarlostoro 2 hours ago
I mean, I opened up the github, and wow, I don't know what it is, but visually, just seeing the GitHub, I can't remember the last time I opened up a font from HN (and they get posted often enough) that really surprised me how nice it looked. There's something really nice about it.
abainbridge 11 hours ago
I prefer bitmap fonts for coding / terminal. My monitor is 100 DPI and I like to cram as much on screen as possible. Here's a comparison of a bitmap font vs Nordwand https://gist.github.com/abainbridge/a4b2647ea91e661a7576417b...
I know I'm a bit weird, but the internet is full of weird people. It seems strange to me that nobody is interested in bitmap fonts these days.
What I really want is a hand anti-aliased bitmap font which prioritizes sharpness.
bbrks 11 hours ago
I always felt crazy for preferring bitmap fonts. The sharpness is unparalleled even against a 4k screen.
I really like using Cozette - it has great glyph support and a hi-dpi version
https://github.com/the-moonwitch/Cozette
I just wish more editors had support for true bitmap fonts! Turning off anti-aliasing on a bitmap->vector converted font is OK but not quite the same.
abainbridge 9 hours ago
Hadn't seen Cozette before. Its lovely. Ta.
Melatonic 5 hours ago
Interesting. I had never heard of them or a difference. Why is a vector font worse ? Can't vectors scale up and down without loss?
ideasman42 11 hours ago
With you on preferring bitmap fonts.
As I got higher DPI monitors, I found it less hassle to use outline fonts, but I still find them preferable - given the option.
layer8 10 hours ago
I don’t prefer bitmap fonts (anymore) because I find subpixel antialiasing beneficial. But I’m with you regarding low-DPI monitors, and the lack of pixel-grid hinting in modern fonts is a pity.
It’s similar to vector icons versus hand-drawn bitmap color icons.
eddyg 10 hours ago
You should look at Pragmata Pro⁽¹⁾.
Hand-hinted by Fabrizio: ”More than 9000 characters optimized from 9pt to 48pt to guarantee the best possible readability.”
It is the ultimate “programmer’s font” and well worth the money for something you stare at every day and the next best thing to a bitmap font in today’s “Retina resolution” world.
Accept no imitations.
Arubis 10 hours ago
1000%. Paid upfront years ago, installed it everywhere I look at code, and the world’s a better place.
You can preview working with it with Blink.app for iOS; I’m unaffiliated but satisfied. Comes with PragmataPro preinstalled.
agos 7 hours ago
+1 for another happy customer. I still wish there was a wider version with all the same bells and whistles, though!
sheeeeesh 10 hours ago
Which bitmap font is this?
abainbridge 10 hours ago
One I made. Available here: https://github.com/abainbridge/deadfrog-lib/blob/master/src/...
Has 7 sizes ranging from 6x10 pixels to 16x30. The larger ones are a bit rubbish. Only covers Latin-1.
JdeBP 8 hours ago
Nobody is interested in bitmap fonts?
* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/terminal-resources.htm...
frankling_ 6 hours ago
Below phone-level PPI values, font AA still just looks blurry to me. As I like 'em large though, there are not too many bitmap options (terminus, for example, looks quite brittle at large sizes). I seem to have settled on lode 1.5 from here on a ~110 PPI display: https://github.com/B2HDPI/B2HDPI
rootlocus 16 hours ago
It's 99% JetBrains Mono from my quick comparison. I can barely see the difference except for $&# and a few others.
LE: Ok, so it's a little more different that JetBrains Mono as this comparison shows https://claude.ai/artifact/HPiALZ7AZ2f5FxSZtcTdNa
dtj1123 15 hours ago
"93% different"
arnvald 13 hours ago
this refers to a single character
dtj1123 10 hours ago
Average is 33% different, which is still a far cry from 99% similar.
dgellow 15 hours ago
Your comparison does show a good amount of differences
claiir 14 hours ago
yea you’re right
Subdivide8452 14 hours ago
Love the A/B tool. Must say, I'm a bit more charmed by Nordwand, even though I always use Jetbrains.
lukeify 13 hours ago
Setting aside the other ways AI is upending society, I absolutely love how we can all share and build on simple artifacts and micro-apps now that can be built entirely from our brain's vision expressed in plain English.
That's a really fun tool.
tasuki 13 hours ago
Eg the `m` is much different: it has the wonderful short middle descender, taken from Ubuntu Mono.
Your comparison says the `m` is 28% different. It's completely different. I don't know what the 28% is supposed to represent (yes, the difference in the area taken, but that's meaningless).
rootlocus 12 hours ago
It's not completely different. Look at other fonts (e.g. comic sans) to see what "completely" means. Norwand is a little wider and the middle line is shorter. 28% seems a fairly accurate measurement. It's almost one third different for just the middle descender.
tasuki 11 hours ago
The shorter middle line gives it a completely different character. Comparing how many pixels are different is meaningless.
I will not voluntarily look at Comic Sans, but thank you for the recommendation!
adrian_b 13 hours ago
I prefer the JetBrains Mono choice for "3", where JetBrains Mono uses the shape that is recommended for writing a "3" that cannot be easily morphed into another digit, like "8".
GreenWatermelon 11 hours ago
It's not just a little different. it's VERY different. it's much more boxy, and letters are closer in height, especially noticeable in uppercase next to lowercase. I would say it's less readable than Jetbrains Mono.
Lower case 'l' even extends above upper case 'G'. it missed with my brain xD
Overall it's really pretty but not a daily driver.
agilek 9 hours ago
It is like saying Arial is the same as Verdana. These fonts are at a glance similar but different.
shoobiedoo 16 hours ago
Looks nice. I just fell in love with Pragmasevka, a mix of Pragmata Pro and Iosevka. It's pretty much a free Pragmata Pro
durdn 12 hours ago
Dude, word! I've been in love with Pragmasevka the moment a friend recommended it. Only thing to adjust is the `cell width` of your terminal.
jan_m_savage 14 hours ago
It's a bit like the paid font Berkeley Mono which I've been using for a while now. But I think Nordwand feels softer and nicer, it embodies a message in the font (thus the fluency effect is more potent).
The message may be subjective but it strikes me as: "I, the font, contain important data [due to the sharp curvatures and uniform size of letter elements]. Not sure if others think about fonts in this way.
Berkeley Mono's message to me feels like "I'm just doing my job, don't mind me, focus on your thing".
bayindirh 13 hours ago
> Berkeley Mono's message to me feels like "I'm just doing my job, don't mind me, focus on your thing".
It's a font inspired by older terminals and "no nonsense" hardware of that era. I put its design philosophy as "it's so good that it's invisible". Using it for years now, and it feels natural and neutral.
With Gruvbox dark, it really feels like I'm using an old terminal. Like how I like it.
jan_m_savage 13 hours ago
A lot of things were better in that era. Keyboards for instance. All keyboards were nice, and some companies are charging a lot of money just to give us back what we once had!
The same goes for milk, cheese, fish cans, cars, chocolate, movies, and clothes. And books.
bayindirh 13 hours ago
That's true. However, I got some nice keyboard(s) for myself, and I don't look back much now. Not all are mechanical, but most are.
I'm happy to report that there is still good milk and cheese out there. Fish is a hit and miss. Belgians still make incredible chocolate, but cars, movies and books have gone downhill.
However, while I'm a pen and paper guy heavily, I love my e-reader.
P.S.: Also, trackballs are much better for many tasks than mice. I'm happy they still make them, and make them well.
jan_m_savage 12 hours ago
Well, you got a point there. Certainly some stuff has improved. Computers for instance. And games. :)
Melatonic 5 hours ago
Didn't IBM actually do a lot of font research back in the day ?
bayindirh 4 hours ago
It's possible. They are in interesting company. They have done a lot of research in very interesting subjects.
I dug some with Gemini. Looks like they did. A couple of references I could find:
- IBM Graphic Design Guide: https://designreviewed.com/artefacts/ibm-graphic-design-guid...
- AFP (for printing any typography, I believe): https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.6.0?topic=concepts-afp-resou...
- Looks like part of their first font specifications still live in OpenType spec: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/i...
Wow.
abcd_f 15 hours ago
> I'm very passionate about the font I am using for my terminal and overall neovim experience
And who isn't?
Squints - m is too weird - tab closed :)
NetOpWibby 15 hours ago
Same thought I had (right after “no slashed zero? Meh”)
strathos 14 hours ago
Slashed zero is listed as an alternative character. Same thing with the lower case m.
silon42 14 hours ago
Someone fork under new name to have these 2 changes as default.
JdeBP 14 hours ago
It has a slashed zero:
https://github.com/tywr/Nordwand-Mono/blob/main/src/glyphs/n...
rbanffy 14 hours ago
Passionate?
Bitch please… https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font.
joshmarinacci 9 hours ago
3270 terminals from GT? From the old Rich building? Who are you?!
rbanffy 5 hours ago
A humble follower who's standing on the shoulders of giants. And GA Tech students with lots of free time, or very odd class assignments.
hebetude 2 hours ago
The real magic of this thread is I wrote a script to download all of these fonts, then open each one in my editor so I can see each one in the wild. This is a really great exercise, thanks for opening up my eyes to bitmap fonts which I didn't know about.
voidUpdate 11 hours ago
I get why its for coders, but what makes it "for adventurers"?
dmtroyer 8 hours ago
came here to ask
dguest 8 hours ago
Didn't you see the mountain?
dguest 3 hours ago
But seriously, it works to market anything:
> A doghnut: a snack for hungry people, and adventurers
duskwuff 4 hours ago
Players of classic roguelike games? ;)
JoshTriplett 15 hours ago
I like that this isn't trying to be aggressively narrow like so many other fonts do. I currently use DejaVu Mono because it feels comfortably spaced.
nvarsj 13 hours ago
I love narrow fonts with coding, but it's all preference in the end. Obligatory "PragmataPro is the best" plug.
ainch 13 hours ago
I use MonoLisa for the same reason
kqr 14 hours ago
I have been going back and forth between Luxi Mono (serif monospace fonts are rare but look great on high-resolution monitors) and Hack (like Helvetica, it has virtually no personality and thus fits well everywhere). Everything else I've seen has looked... weird or off somehow. But this is one of the first alternatives I'm entertaining the idea of trying.
My main concern is that the tall glyphs for less than < and greater than > will disambiguate badly with actual Unicode left 〈 and right angle brackets 〉.
Edit: I also realised just now the ASCII hyphen-minus - is quite long with this typeface, which makes it ambiguous with the longer dashes. (It looks freakin' great in pure ASCII environments, though!)
chirayuk 12 hours ago
The hyphen is as wide as the em dash (it's one pixel higher than the em-dash—the only visible difference to my eyes). And the $ symbol doesn't have a line that goes through all the way through. It doesn't work for me for daily use, but looks quite clean and nice overall.
delta_p_delta_x 15 hours ago
The overall shape of the glyphs (excluding lowercase 'l', that is, 'ell', not 'eye') is that of Berkeley Mono.[1]
Geezus_42 14 hours ago
I will never understand paying $50 for a font.
oblio 14 hours ago
I think it's called "disposable income" :-)
delta_p_delta_x 12 hours ago
> I will never understand paying $50 for a font.
I will never understand people who expect fonts for free. They don't grow on trees. Font development is extremely involved, and I am happy to die on this particular elitist hill: the overwhelming majority of free fonts are absolutely rubbish, including the Liberation family, which is available by default on most Linux distros.
Any font that is free and is still reasonably good is almost certainly designed by a type foundry for a megacorp's branding and user interface (so, things like SF Pro, Segoe UI, Open/Noto Sans, Roboto, JetBrains Mono, IBM Plex, Source Sans, Fira Sans, Inter, etc), or are historic properties of the type foundries themselves, like Garamond, Helvetica, Didot, Minion, etc.
ASCII isn't the only set of characters. Just the LGK (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic) set of glyphs alone including combining marks, diacritics, contextual alternates and ligatures alone amount to several thousand glyphs, each of which has to be individually tuned for different weights, hinted for different display resolutions, hinted for RGB/BGR subpixel rendering, and more.
toyg 8 hours ago
I think it's an investment in ergonomics, like a good chair or a good table. If your job involves staring at text 8 hours a day, $50 for a good font that relaxes your eyes and your brain is pennies well-spent.
This goes double for any contractor who can just write it down as business expense.
JdeBP 14 hours ago
I don't know about that. In some places ('m', '0') it is closer to Ubuntu Mono.
moecables 6 hours ago
I would love to use it but that lowercase M really bothers me so maybe it would be perfect for me to fork and build my own version of it
hawk_3221 15 hours ago
I don't see myself moving away from Ioskeley Mono
trumbitta2 14 hours ago
I used to be a coder like you, but then I took a Claude to the knee.
jaapz 13 hours ago
we still have to look at a terminal though so a nice monospace font is always welcome
(although I'll keep using Fira)
ThePhysicist 14 hours ago
Are people vibecoding fonts now? Just wondering as I see at least one new font pop up here every day almost...
oblio 14 hours ago
Most likely. People are throwing LLMs at everything and seeing what sticks.
As one YouTuber said: it's the first time we can create (somewhat) coherent, context dependent and new content using something else than other humans.
I can't say I'm too keen on wading through piles of crap, I'm also not keen on the AI bubble and its popping nor on AI's impact on employment, but if we survive all of this, we might end up with a lot of new stuff that could actually be good. 1% of this garbage will be good, but since the entire pile will be so large, that 1% might double or more our options in various fields.
piskov 12 hours ago
Operator Mono is still very, very nice.
mstkllah 12 hours ago
And way more expensive.
fercircularbuf 14 hours ago
Nice work. I unfortunately wouldn't be able to use it for programming because I find the parenthesis and square bracket look too similar, and it would definitely increase extraneous cognitive load.
lxe 4 hours ago
After Iosevka came out, no other coding font has replaced it for me
nrvn 3 hours ago
Same. But we are probably just a subset of those who prefer narrow fonts. Pragmata Pro and Iosevka are top. The majority of new fonts that have popped up in recent years are all “wide”.
msephton 9 hours ago
I’m not sure I’ll use this (I’m an MD IO Trial user) but I will say that finding a font you can read without thinking is one of the greatest productivity boosts as a developer.
pookieinc 15 hours ago
As someone who isn't super into fonts, this font reminds me a lot of Berkeley Mono, which is an incredible terminal font
alexalx666 14 hours ago
I was super hyped to try their other fonts after getting Berkeley Mono but it seems like "Coming soon." means maybe never
vishnuharidas 14 hours ago
Looks good, please put up on a simple web page with a few code samples and allowing us to edit and try.
Findecanor 13 hours ago
It gives me the vibes of output from 1970's typewriters that my dad used.
Having aging eyes, I wish monospace fonts made 8 and 0 (zero) more different from each other. I notice that I have started to confuse those two glyphs when in small sizes.
b33l 4 hours ago
"stiff and cold", just how I like it!
rbanffy 14 hours ago
It reminds me of an old Olivetti typewriter my aunt gave me to play with.
bronlund 14 hours ago
I love my ligatures, I will not be using a font without them.