Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

To this day I haven't seen a monospaced font superior to Courier New.

And before anyone asks: No, this isn't a meme. Yes, I'm 300% serious.

> To this day I haven't seen a monospaced font superior to Courier New.

Liberation Mono. Metrics that match Courier New, very legible at all font sizes, easy on the eyes and consistent, wide character support, free, none of that ligatures stuff (personal preference). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts

Some might also like Cousine as an alternative, a version called FiraCousine also supports ligatures for those who want them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croscore_fonts

I didn't know about the Croscore fonts, thanks. They look very similar to the Liberation fonts.

Liberation Mono is not bad. Sadly, Liberation Sans is a no-go because it lacks crossbars on the capital "i". Such an annoying failing of so many sans fonts.

> Such an annoying failing of so many sans fonts.

Here's an example of some fonts, for anyone curious: https://i.imgur.com/jYA6jt3.png

Some fonts like Arial are bad at this, capital "I" and lowercase "L" look the same. Calibri and Liberation sans both have slight differences, but not enough to not be confusing. Some fonts like Open Sans have crossbars on capital "I", which solves this problem. But that's not the only solution, fonts like PT Sans have a different looking lowercase "L" which is different enough not to cause confusion. Then again, technically you could also run into issues with the vertical line symbol "|".

Also, PT Mono is a nice font, but has issues with a small full stop symbol at smaller sizes (not as pronounced as Liberation Mono, annoying): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PT_Fonts

Thanks! I compiled a list of sans-serif fonts with acceptable capital "i" and zero/O distinction a while back... but don't have it on hand. But it's a lot faster to go to fonts.google.com, select sans-serif, and change the example text to "Does this have a proper I and O and 0" and start scrolling!

There's a vectorized version of Monaco with pixel-perfect hinting when anti-aliasing is disabled that I've been using for years now. I don't remember where I got it from though. It's beautifully legible at any size.

You have to be trolling us. Literally the fish that got away story for fonts.

If you want to go fishing on this, one hole is Apple's old low-end printer line. The printer disks had expanded versions of the 'city' fonts which never shipped with the OS.

Could you share the font files? I’m curious to see it.

I was trying to remember the Apple font I used to download for use with IDEs in Linux back in the day because it was by far the best for programming I'd ever seen. Monaco must have been the one.

I'd love to see it

Allow me to introduce to you, Courier Prime:

https://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/

It's slightly thicker to more closely match what Courier from a typewriter actually looked like on a page with the ink bleed -- Courier New was modeled after the typewriter forms, not the result on the page, which to me has always been a massive error.

And Prime has beautiful, actual italics.

To this day, there isn't a font that I hate more than I hate Courier New.

Don't know why, it is of course not logical, but it is.

Probably not the font itself but the environment around it when you see it?

You usually sees it as the default monospace typeface in an old windows environment, probably with no anti-aliasing and with low resolution screen. That combination is an eyesore.

Courier New in an modern environment, with modern text rendering and anti-aliasing on high res screen is actually not bad at all.

I see it in other people's PuTTY sessions. It's so bad.

Use Consolas, or Droid Mono, Lucida Console, almost anything.

Courier is so thin and terrible. Combine that with the default color scheme of most Linux terminals...ugh.

Maximize that terminal window on a 16:9 display when connected to a device that only gives 80 characters wide output as the final mail in the coffin.

The only issue I have is with the 'weight' of Courier New. It's too thin for me to be able to read. If it were just a hair thicker and had proper ligatures, I might use it.

That's because it was digitized wrong, from the metal rather than from the effect of the metal smacking a ribbon onto paper.

> To this day I haven't seen a monospaced font superior to Courier New.

"To this day I haven't seen a monospaced font that I like more than Courier New", surely.

What is your quantitative measure for this, and what are the values of the other fonts you've tried?

I really like Courier New but I like DejaVu Sans Mono (https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/) more. :)

Have you tried Courier Prime, with a less anemic weight and optional O0 and Il1 differentiation? (Though it has janky hinting on Windows.)

Too thin for me. I prefer regular old Courier.

Courier makes my eyes bleed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com