alt Hacker NewsIosevka is an open-source, sans-serif and slab-serif monospace font
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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.
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.
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]
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
Related:
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)
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
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.
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.
Iosevka is also available in Nerd Fonts. https://www.nerdfonts.com/#features
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
What's the origin of the name?
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.
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.
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
I adhered to and finished out my tech career with APL385:
…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.
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 :)
Why is it called sans-serif when there is serif on i j etc?
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!
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.
Once we use Berkeley mono font, we will never switch to another one :)
Whenever font discussions come up, I will try everyones suggestions to find better than what I have, and always came back to Berkeley. Its almost near perfect for coding!
Any time I point font-seekers to Iosevka's Repo, I never hear from them again. Surely that's a testament to the quality of treatment.
M PLUS Code https://mplusfonts.github.io/
The most underrated font ever.
I've been using Iosevka for more than 5 years now, it seems odd using anything else. The author is prolific and has made it really easy to build your own customised version. I don't think I'll ever move from using it.
It was such an interesting font that when I saw another font "Ioskeley Mono", I decided to customize it myself: https://github.com/ferronweb/iron-mono :)
"glyphs are exactly 1/2em wide". whut. 1em is the width of the M character. glyphs are exactly 1 em wide, they just happen to have a slim m.
For me, Iosevka will always be the one that worked. It got me to abandon bitmap fonts.
Iosevka, a proper fontconfig, and this value `export FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="cff:no-stem-darkening=0 autofitter:no-stem-darkening=0"` are all I ever needed.
I love all kinds of monospace fonts, there's just so much you can do with a fixed width font!
My personal daily drivers are SF Mono and Berkeley Mono.
It also has many weights. In my opinion it's one of the best monospaced fonts where you actually can use weight as an additional dimension in syntax highlighting.
If you are looking for Iosevka with CJK characters, check out Sarasa Gothic.
Impressive. Very nice. Let's see Paul Allen's font...
I've been using Droid Sans Mono for everything mono for a long time and can recommend it. But this font might be great too. Any Droid Sans Mono lovers out there?
I fell in love with the narrow width of Iosevka which saved quite a bit of screen space for other things. Although there are always some people that loathe whenever I post screenshots of code using the font, "the m looks like a solid block of pixels" and the like.
Wish code editors would support different fonts per semantic region. Jetbrains, if you are reading this, implement this: <https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-29552/Allow-differ...>.
The heading of Iosevka doesn't do the font right, my first thought was that this would be yet another soulless sans-serif. But it has tons of interesting variants. Hats of to Iosevka Etoile. See also <https://monaspace.githubnext.com> if you like big versatile font families.
Their examples of their font made me fall in love with an alternative, IBM Plex, that they showed. IBM Plex shows more of their example assembly code than any of the other three, and quite clearly.
I've been using Iosevka for years now, it's definitely one of my favorites. What I enjoy the most is that it's narrow, so I can cram more data per line.
I use both the standard/fixed versions and Aile and Etoile for UI.
Good to know that the age old tradition of calling a font with serifs sans-serif is well alive and kicking.
The reason here is that the basic glyph shape is that of a sans-serif, but still got serifs added afterwards. That doesn't stop it from diluting the meaning of the term.
I really dislike how narrow it is. Fortunately that is customizable! This is my version that I’ve modeled off of Input Mono: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/iosevka-output
For those not aware, Iosevka is the font that gives you perfec vertical alignment in monospace tables/flowcharts with CJK/emojis.
Got introduced to Iosevka through watching Tsoding. Really cool coding font.
meta: if you are a heretic like me, use a proportional coding font. (in 2026 we can move past 80-column terminal style coding)
for this, i like Input Sans a lot.
It’s nice to see this font have a slab serif, because monospace serif fonts are quite rare (I don’t consider Courier a serif). The only other monospace serif font I can think of is Monaspace Xenon. [1]
[1] There was also at one point a monospace variant of Bitstream Vera Serif called “Verily Serif”.
It is interesting that it differentiates between oblique and italic, something that not many fonts aimed at the monospace crowd do, in both the English and Cyrillic alphabets. The list of variants for the letter k is longer than I expected.
Alas, it is oblong, not square.
And 7 thousand-odd code points is not as large a range as it used to be a couple of decades ago. That said, it does have MouseText, the 7-segment LED digits, and suchlike from the Supplementary Plane 1.
I remember falling in love with PragmataPro many years ago, I really like narrow fonts, but I couldn’t afford it (I don’t remember how much it was at the time but it was something insane, at least for my wallet). Then Iosevka entered the scene, and I never looked back. Really awesome project, especially the customization part.
11 years old. Congratulations!
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...