Hacker News Reader

Comment by logbiscuitswave | Hacker News Reader

Every so often I go on a “font bender” and start searching for my “next great coding font”. I’ve been using Hack (https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/) for several years, but after looking at this I might need to give it a try. It looks really nice and the price is right. The font in the OP looks great too, but I can’t bring myself to pay for it. Not when there’s so many great alternatives out there at no cost.

View on HN

One class of alternatives you could also consider is narrow fonts like PragmataPro[1] (commercial) or Iosevka[2] (gratis, FOSS). Being able to fit more stuff onto the screen side-by-side is what enabled me to get as much into tmux as I have.

[1] https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/

[2] https://typeof.net/Iosevka/

regular fonts seem wide after several years of me using iosevka

PragmataPro is so close to perfection for me! But it loses to MPlus Code because PragmataPro doesn't support font weights below 400 (yet?)

I still bought it, because it's gorgeous, thank you for sharing it. I've emailed the font creator so hopefully they've got plans for thinner versions.

Same. I love experimenting with my coding font and for the past year or so I was using Hack.

I wasn't able to find anything better yet after trying a lot of fonts: Fira, JetBrains Mono, Iosevka, Monaspace, Ubuntu Mono, and others.

Or perhaps I'm too familiar with Hack now and everything else now looks weird..

Hack's Bitstream Vera ancestry brings me back to installing Debian as a thirteen year old, a strong nostalgic pull.

I was the same until I started using Fira Code and don't think I'll ever go back to anything else. the ligatures are worth it

https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

I must say it does look awesome.

Although I'm personally not a fan of ligatures, I feel they may increase mental burden at times;

for example having to look closely if it's = vs == or == vs === among other examples.

+100 I really dislike ligatures. They are one of those things that seem great in theory but I find them to be a real distraction. This is why I never got into the JetBrains fonts — there was no ligature-free option. (Maybe there is now, but I haven’t felt motivated to try it again.)

> Maybe there is now

You’re right! Check out the NL (no ligature) version: https://github.com/JetBrains/JetBrainsMono/tree/master/fonts...

You don't have to use them, even if they're in the font, just turn them off in your reditor.

Conversely I can turn them on for code I didn't write.

There is no downside to ligatures.

I also dislike ligatures, but I have been using JetBrains Mono for over a year now with ligatures disabled. works great!

Hack is very underrated and awesome. Fira Code is nice, so is Adobe Source Code Pro [0], and Iosevka [1]. Yet, Berkeley is truly at its own level.

[0]: https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro

[1]: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka

Source Code Pro is damn near perfect for me, I've been using it for some years. Occasionally I get an itch to explore other fonts, but I always come back to this one, all its refined details just feel good to my eyes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com