Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

by birdculture • 9 months ago

407 182 9 months ago

MarsIronPI• 9 months ago

Not trying to be negative, just confused: I don't really see how this font is "designed for symbol-heavy languages". The symbols look normal to me. Maybe the letters are a little more spaced? I'd love to be enlightened.

floppyd2• 9 months ago

Near-Perfect Alignment: multi-character symbols like ->, >>=, =~, :: align seamlessly

The GitHub page has a list with 5 items of what was the focus, this is the first (and I think the most easily noticeable) area

layer84• 9 months ago

I wonder why only near-perfect.

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

designer here. by symbol-heavy languages i mean languages like Perl and Haskell which make heavy use of symbols (sigils in Perl and operators in Haskell). Myna was designed after my frustration with other monospace fonts combined with my (self-imposed) inability to use ligatures.

Avshalom2• 9 months ago

Apl, BQN and Oiua would like to talk to you.

crazygringo2• 9 months ago

I think it might be useful to put some screenshots of other fonts on your page, to show what symbol or alignment problems yours corrects. Because I've studied a lot of typeface design, and I can't really figure out what you're doing, what pain points you're trying to address.

Because when you say "and $, @, % seem ever mismatched?", I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. I certainly am curious though, since you went to all the work of building a new typeface!

And when you talk about fixing alignment, like all of these seem correctly vertically aligned with each other here on HN at least in monospace mode:

  <->=+-~

So if you could demonstrate what it is fixing with reference to the most common monospace system/coding fonts, I think that would help a ton.

rbanffy5• 9 months ago

Where does the design for the text characters come from? Is it based on a mono font you find readable?

johnisgood• 9 months ago

Rust is super symbol-heavy, too.

edem2• 9 months ago

why do you have this self imposed inability?

eviks15• 9 months ago

That's because the proper way to explain design differences is by showing them, and there is no comparison, so of course it's easy to get confused

floppyd2• 9 months ago

I appreciate the effort, but the result kind of shows why usually symbols are aligned as they are. Dashes, colons, angle brackets — all look way too high next to lowercase letter. I assume this stems from trying to align everything with brackets, and those are aligned with uppercase letters kind of naturally. But I don't think the tradeoff is worth it.

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

i understand the point you raise. but i believe symbols are generally aligned as they are because most fonts are designed for text and many monospace fonts respect those typographic traditions.

but i think code is not text and breaking some tradition improves readability.

the dash (hyphen) is actually supposed to align with the greater than symbol to resemble the arrow (extremely common symbol in C and many functional languages).

layer84• 9 months ago

The greater/less-than symbols look too high to me as well, also when used as angle brackets like in HTML/XML/C++/Java/TypeScript/….

adastra22• 9 months ago

A rust example is conspicuously missing from the README.

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

please check the illustrations below.

tacker20003• 9 months ago

And JS and PHP, etc… some people have other language priorities and thats fine

layer84• 9 months ago

I despise this style of curly braces where the arms look more like “S” than like “ʃ”. Don’t go backwards! :)

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

a few others have raised the same point. in my defense i can only say that i adore that particular style because it looks more like what i draw by hand.

layer84• 9 months ago

I guess it depends on what you are used to. I draw them like “ʃ” by hand, and find the more squiggly style unnecessarily noisy visually. It makes the brace direction a little less obvious to see at first glance.

baobun• 9 months ago

The curly braces are the one thing that really "pop out" from the font the moment I look at it. Even if I can agree they are pretty and even adorable, also visually noisy, distracting, and something that makes me not want to try the font out.

Being distinct from parens and brackets is obviously still desired and sorry I'm not a designer myself enough to give more specific feedback on how it could be improved.

Otherwise very attractive font.

mouse_2• 9 months ago

It's perfect. Please don't change anything about it.

evanjrowley• 9 months ago

How do you feel about 'l' and '1' looking so similar in Myna?

mouse_2• 9 months ago

Don't care even a 1ittle

jug• 9 months ago

I personally love Jetbrains Mono; it's been one of a kind for me and my tastes. I like it over Consolas (although this is one is pretty good on Windows), Fira Mono, Inconsolata, Plex Mono. But I can see the effort here and I'm definitely going to give this one a try! I've found that typefaces can change a lot depending on pixel alignment and rendering engines (i.e. ClearType, GDI, FreeType, Quartz... let pixel grid decide or not, or by how much...). So it's hard to tell if this is going to win me over without actually trying!

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

if you try it please feel free to create an issue if you find some rendering bug in your system. i have tested and used it extensively on Linux but not Windows or MacOS as much as i should.

silversides• 9 months ago

It's gorgeous. Thank you.

wvbdmp• 9 months ago

There is already a relatively well-known icon font called Myna UI: https://mynaui.com/icons

Just a heads-up.

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

thanks for pointing it out. shouldn't be that confusing, i guess.

fph2• 9 months ago

The Latex example should include at least a math formula.

kccqzy2• 9 months ago

And the Haskell example doesn't even include common operators like <$> or <*> or <>. I would've also expected some fancier arrows like =<< or >>>.

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

if you're looking for those Haskell operators, you'd find them in the huge banner at the start. maybe i should also add them in the illustrations too.

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

agreed. formulae are essential LaTeX. are there any particular glyphs compositions which you'd suggest?

fph2• 9 months ago

Thanks! For something more complex, I suggest a moderately complex formula with parentheses and superscripts like $f \in \mathcal{C}^0([a,b])$, an equation delimited by \[...\], and maybe a macro declaration with parameters like \newcommand\halves[1]{\frac{#1}{2}}.

jablanyu• 9 months ago

Genuine question: is everyone coding on such high resolution displays and/or with font sizes so big nowadays? For me, the example screenshots are useless to see how the font would actually look like in my editor.

mholt• 9 months ago

I definitely increase my font size, so I'm not straining my eyes. Any monitor with a lower than about 120 PPI causes me strain, unless I really boost the size. For example I read HN at anywhere from 150-200%.

trenchpilgrim• 9 months ago

Yes, the bigger fonts are easier to read.

robinhood• 9 months ago

Hard to talk about "everyone" since I'm not aware of any large polls around this point. On a personal note, yes, considering that I'm 44, I tend to always increase font size everywhere: the code editor, the terminal, the browser, the OS itself and mobile phone.

It's unavoidable for me. I was making fun of those people with huge font sizes on phones 10 years ago. I'm almost one of them now.

17186274402• 9 months ago

As a counter example, I always decrease the font-size everywhere. The annoying trend of bloating everything with whitespace, means that less and less stuff fits on the screen. But even HN is on 80% right now.

kid64• 9 months ago

Ah, to be young.

globular-toast4• 9 months ago

Not me. Ubuntu Mono is the only font I'm able to use because all others I've tried just take up so much space. I'm literally losing lines of text with other fonts. I need that density. I haven't tried this one yet, though.

jijojv• 9 months ago

Looks great except for l looking like 1

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

thanks for the feedback. i didn't think about it until a few people commented here. if you use it and want it changed, please open a feature request. just like the curly braces, a disambiguating variant of Myna can be issued in the next release. i gather removing the left stroke at the bottom of the `l` would fix it for you. i think changing the `1` won't make sense as that's how it always is.

imiric2• 9 months ago

I like it, it's very clean. Nice work!

I like that it's relatively compact horizontally. If I had to nitpick, the curly braces look a bit too "wavy" for my taste, which doesn't quite match the hard angles on some other glyphs.

My favorite monospace font for the past 10+ years has been Iosevka Term ss08. I've tried many others over the years, and Iosevka is just perfect IMO.

Out of curiosity: what are the tools and the process to create a font today? It would be interesting to read a bit about that.

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

thanks for the feedback. about the braces please see another comment below. the issue of needlessly complicated braces has been raised quite a few times now. a variant could be considered if there is more interest.

this particular font is quite simple and doesn't contain any ligatures, etc. so most of the design is in Fontforge. i didn't start from scratch. it started out as a customised version of Source Code Pro (released as Hera and currently archived in my profile) but i borrowed many glyphs from other fonts and modified many others to the point it became a different font. you can open the .sfd file directly in Fontforge to edit and modify it yourself.

gorgoiler• 9 months ago

Very nice and condensed. The same reason I switched to Iosevka (Joseph), recently:

https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka

The fun thing with Iosevka is that one stands a reasonable chance of reading the source code (as opposed to just random numbers in SplineSets etc.)

java-man• 9 months ago

My favorite monospaced font, on Windows and Mac.

typpilol• 9 months ago

I switched to codenewroman mono with a nerd font.

Makes my terminal look amazing as well.

Especially since I've been working on a color scripts compilation that relies heavily on font being accurate

gdwatson• 9 months ago

Beside being a neat font in its own right, Iosevka allows for custom builds with different settings, selection from a bunch glyph variants, and custom ligature choices. It's pretty incredible.

andai• 9 months ago

Iosevka is great. I use a custom version Iosevka Orw from here https://github.com/s0la/orw/tree/master/.fonts

It's about halfway between standard Iosevka and a typical monospace font in terms of narrowness. I find it ideal.

electroly• 9 months ago

Thank you for the detail that Iosevka is a form of the name "Joseph." I've used this font for years and it never clicked for me--nor did the correct pronunciation, which it turns out was always listed on the readme.

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

Iosevka is a beautiful font indeed. the condensed look of Myna was inspired by Iosevka. i saw it once in a coding demo and decided to make it condensed. the predecessor of Myna (called Hera, available on my profile) was just a customised version of Source Code Pro (and is non-condensed, just like Source Code Pro).

space_ghost• 9 months ago

I thought Myna looked weirdly familiar. I use Source Code Pro just about everywhere.

h4ch1• 9 months ago

You should check out Pragmasevka https://github.com/shytikov/pragmasevka

Switched from Iosevka to this, feels a little more readable.

thetwentyone• 9 months ago

Also see the JuliaMono typeface: https://juliamono.netlify.app

It was designed to be a comprehensive monocode typeface to support Julia's full Unicode support.

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

thanks for pointing it out. i mostly program in ASCII range. Myna covers a reasonable subset of Unicode but one can indeed use Julia as a fallback for Myna to cover Unicode if one wishes.

eviks15• 9 months ago

Thanks for the link, at first glance seems like a fascinatingly rich font (by the way, to overcome the char/font limit they can publish JuliaMono2 and 3 and 4 and then set those as fallback fonts to reach the full coverage...)

kstrauser• 9 months ago

This is very pretty, but...

The kerning in the "Lorem" at the top drives me batty. It nearly looks like 2 words to my eye. I know that's super subjective and it probably doesn't bother anyone else at all. It's kind of a deal breaker for me, though.

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

i use this font basically everywhere and have become kinda blind to the defects. for me it looked best when glyphs are mostly centered (which makes them "genuinely monospace" if you catch my drift).

but you raise a valid point. it is not entirely subjective. some obviously grotesque (no pun) kerning would need to be changed in the next version. if you can point out some obvious ones i would urge you to create an issue.

theultdev• 9 months ago

Looks beautiful! Have you done any focus on Typescript by chance?

I will test it out and report any abnormalities I see!

olivia-banks3• 9 months ago

It would be nice to see some comparison with other fonts on the GitHub page; the symbols look normal to me, at least. It looks very pretty regardless!

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

thanks for pointing it out. i would need to consider that idea.

the symbols are all pure ASCII and are supposed to look normal. it is not a ligature font and neither focusses on Unicode symbols. the symbols are just more evenly adjusted with the letters and with each other.

olivia-banks3• 9 months ago

That's something I really like about this front. I'm not a huge fan of ligatures and think they're counter productive. Makes it a bit harder to see the differences though, so I think a comparison would be great.

msephton2• 9 months ago

You could make a PR to add it to https://www.programmingfonts.org so people can become aware and compare

tmtvl• 9 months ago

Looks pretty good, but I often need to read Japanese characters so I'm gonna stick to IBM Plex, which has both Monospace and CJK variants.

justsomehnguy• 9 months ago

IBM Plex

I found what while it's not the best for me - it is suprisingly good for a PowerPoint-like presentations, #specially the condensced vars.

msephton2• 9 months ago

IBM Plex Mono has been my choice for years. I'm always open-minded regarding change and every time I hear of new fonts I do a comparison, but there's always something annoying in the new font that IBM Plex Mono does right. Still, I'm looking forward to doing the comparisons of the new fonts in hearing about on this post.

Pet_Ant• 9 months ago

I don't know why "->" should render as an arrow when we could just use an actual Unicode arrow. If need be, have macros for your editors that allow you to convert the "->" into an actual arrow.

gmueckl• 9 months ago

Not all code editing sessions are created equal. I dare you to deal with Unicode symbols in a vim session over SSH with a 1 second RTT, for example :).

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

it is partially a matter of design and code philosophy. many like the simplicity of ASCII and consider ligatures distracting.

but more than preference there is matter of availability and consistency. Unicode is not available for all possible glyph combinations and many times what we see in Unicode looks quite ugly in monospace because of the width constraint.

ligatures are also not supported everywhere. that is one of the reason i designed this.

vanderZwan• 9 months ago

Because there are programming languages where "->" and "=>" have semantic meaning, but the unicode arrows don't.

sampo• 9 months ago

have macros for your editors that allow you to convert the "->" into an actual arrow.

Or, as suggested here, use language macros:

    #define → ->

https://lists.isocpp.org/std-proposals/2023/01/5485.php

teo_zero3• 9 months ago

This is not valid C, though. The characters allowed for identifiers are defined in Unicode Standard Annex #31, and those easily understood as operators, like arrows, are not included.

globular-toast4• 9 months ago

Using Unicode would be awful. I have a button on my keyboard for every character I need. How do I type a unicode arrow? Oh, now I need editor macros? Or I need to get out a special keyboard per language?

Unicode is not there for you to necessarily use the whole thing. It's there so that everyone in the world can encode their text the same way, despite having a completely different set of characters on their keyboards.

eviks15• 9 months ago

how do I type a unicode arrow?

Same way you type everything else - by pressing a button combination that corresponds to the symbol in your layout. Or by using an app that does it without changing the layout. Like your editor could insert → when you type fn () -> {} Or you'd simply not type it and continue to use ->

Or I need to get out a special keyboard per language?

No, your regular keyboard will work fine for any language.

Unicode is not there for you to necessarily use the whole thing

The suggestion was about literally 1 char (maybe implicitly about a dozen more), why did you jump to the millions from "the whole thing"???

o11c3• 9 months ago

This, like many fonts, fails to handle vertical arrows:

  |    ^
  v    |

Note that the raised appearance of `^` exists for compatibility with typewriters that use the backspace key to use it as a circumflex accent over lowercase letters. This is doubly obsolete today (we have real combined characters and can use them on uppercase). This is one of those cases where the name originally used for the character in various standards is in conflict with the way people actually have come to use it.

The bottom of the independent caret should be lower, roughly symmetrical to the letter `v` (this is not traditionally a goal). The top should still reach the height of a capital letter, but the bottom should descend into the lowercase letter area - for many fonts, perhaps to the level of the horizontal part of a lowercase `e` (is there a typographical term for this?)? For fonts where the x-height is half of the cap-height, there might be no overlap with the lowercase letter, though it still doesn't need to worry about leaving space.

The bottom of the caret is, however, higher than the mathematical "and" sign ∧, which rests on the baseline (and usually does not reach full height) or the Greek capital lambda `Λ` which is full height.

munchler• 9 months ago

Your point about the caret is interesting, but I'm a bit dubious about using them for vertical arrows. I don't think it would be practical to type this combination in one go, since the two symbols would be on two separate lines. For the upward arrow, are you suggesting caret-return-space-space-space-...-vertical bar?

Are there any programming languages that use vertical arrows? Do they appear on one line or two?

o11c3• 9 months ago

Are there any programming languages that use vertical arrows? Do they appear on one line or two?

Befunge (1993; many later languages were inspired by it) uses just the ASCII arrowheads. The arrow tail is more likely to exist in doc comments.

leephillips2• 9 months ago

APL

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

thanks for pointing it out. as i mention below in a comment, there are bound to be many combinations which don't align (especially vertical ones). i would ideally tell you to invoke a feature request but i am not sure this esoteric combination could even be detected in a contextual alternate rule (which Myna doesn't support anyways for now).

beside if i may say so in my defense, the comparison is a bit unfair as a V (a full letter) is being compared to a caret (almost a superscript symbol). i have broken many typographical conventions but it won't make sense to break programmatic convention of the caret operator just for the alignment of the vertical arrows.

pessimizer2• 9 months ago

won't make sense to break programmatic convention of the caret operator

I don't know why the elevated position of the caret is sacred, other than to use as an accent mark. It could cause confusion with the ∧ (AND).

tln• 9 months ago

Are you trying to get a ligature that crosses lines?

You could maybe try U+2303 (⌃) for the up arrowhead, but why not just use U+2191 (↑) for the standard arrow?

The crossbar height of lowercase letters is not a common typographical reference point...

o11c3• 9 months ago

I don't care about ligatures, just symmetry.

imiric2• 9 months ago

I don't see such a niche use case as a design failure.

By your logic, the lowercase "v" should extend even higher to meet the pipe. The caret has conventionally been higher for a long time, and IMO would look out of place making it the inverse "v".

If you want arrows, just use U+2191 and U+2193.

sevg• 9 months ago

the way people actually have come to use it

I have never seen anyone use it as part of an up arrow spread across two lines in the way that you’re suggesting. So I don’t really understand your point.

Ok it’s not symmetrical, but I don’t buy your argument that it _should_ be (or that it’s a reasonable complaint to make about a font).

normie3000• 9 months ago

I have never seen anyone use it as part of an up arrow spread across two lines in the way that you’re suggesting.

You've never heard of "caret and stick"?

Culonavirus• 9 months ago

Totally. Ultra niche edge case nonsense.

pessimizer2• 9 months ago

Rust compiler error output certainly uses a lot of vertical arrows. But it also highlights the fact that the caret is often used to highlight characters on the line above, and if it were lower it would be worse at doing that.

I do hate this asymmetry when I'm trying to do an ASCII flowchart of some sort.

But I'd also like to add that calling it an unreasonable complaint sounds a little hysterical. It's just a complaint. It's also a clear one, and of obvious use.

Avshalom2• 9 months ago

Come to APL we have ↑↓

Aurornis4• 9 months ago

Note that the raised appearance of `^` exists for compatibility with typewriters that use the backspace key to use it as a circumflex accent over lowercase letters. This is doubly obsolete today

The origins don’t really matter at this point. That’s what the character looks like and it’s what everyone expects.

Your use case is extremely niche. Making a font choice for that specific double-line situation would alienate everyone else who just wants the ^ to look like a ^.

Like others suggested, just use the Unicode arrows if you want arrows. Let the ^ be a classic ^.

It’s really disappointing when I find a new font that seems interesting until I encounter one weird design choice that makes it surprising to read. Fonts should be boring, typical, and follow what your brain expects to see, not trying to erase decades of typography norms and start something new for one common character.

eviks15• 9 months ago

Fonts should be boring, typical, and follow what your brain expects to see

So you're ok with permanent confusion of 0 vs O because "boring/expected" doesn't add a dot for zero?

erase decades of typography norms and

This is not (such) a (n absolute) thing, there are different contradictory norms that persist for decades, just like in and artistic (though not only) field, so at a practical level this offers no guidance for any specific decision, you'd have to actually consider it in that specific case to see whether it makes sense

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

any particular glyph you find surprising in Myna? feel free to open a feature request.

eviks15• 9 months ago

Doesn't raised appearance also exist for compatibility with math exponentiation? Do still not obsolete

rbanffy5• 9 months ago

Those symbols were never intended to be used as arrows. Every modern programming language today can use Unicode at least in comments, and there are extensive groups of characters for box and arrow drawings.

procaryote• 8 months ago

Not a solution to your issue but as my main use of arrows is in documentation I've just mapped ↓ ↑ → ← to a covenient place on my keyboard. It's pretty at least

It allows comments to indicate the thing they're talking about ↑

Or logical → implications

lynguist• 9 months ago

I wouldn’t program with it but I find it extremely aesthetic.

dannyfritz07• 9 months ago

Very similar to Intel One Mono which is a font I love to use.

- https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/company-overview/one...

superfamicom• 9 months ago

Reminds me of the beautiful M+ fonts.

https://mplusfonts.github.io/

JSR_FDED• 9 months ago

My programming font in Vim for the last 10 years!

daneel_w• 9 months ago

After testing it for an hour I concluded that for me, Cascadia Code is a lot more legible.

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

thanks for testing it. if i can suggest, a wider space between letter helps, for me at least.

kazinator3• 9 months ago

Do you ever feel like your font treats symbols as second-class glyphs?

No because this problem has been solved by other font designers working with pretty much exactly the same requirements.

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

thanks for the feedback. if that be the case, i'm afraid Myna might not be of much use to you.

kazinator3• 9 months ago

That's not the case.

Rather, you don't provide reasons to motivate people to switch to your font and stick with it.

You have mainly two kinds of users:

- those who have always stuck with whatever font came up by default in their text editor or terminal emulator.

- those who have gone through a phase of experimenting and tried a good bunch of fonts, then settled.

When you motivate the former group to experiment, they will tend to go into the second group: once they get into the workflow of installing fonts, they won't just stop at the one that was suggested to them first.

The second group is harder to motivate to try new fonts; they will do it if there is some compelling reason they can understand /before/ installing.

You don't explain how your font stands out above the competition. Or, maybe the personal angle: I tried these fifteen different fonts and still had to make one because X, Y, Z, so here it is.

teo_zero3• 9 months ago

Beautiful.

The site should be more explicit about which characters are covered. I understand it's only ASCII, right? Although the example shows some currency signs that are definitely out of the 0-127 plane.

It would also be appreciated if you could suggest a fallback font for those glyphs not present in Myna, so that if I ever need to include the word "naïve" in a string, for example, the "ï" won't look as an alien character.

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

thanks for the feedback. almost all of the Latin extended and quite a reasonable subset of Unicode is covered. the word "naïve", for example, renders perfectly because the "i with diaeresis" is present in Myna. if you find any which are not covered and want them added, please create a feature request. about the fallback font, you can use any monospace font you like. i don't use any fallback generally because i work almost exclusively in the ASCII range in the editor.

NooneAtAll3• 9 months ago

My gripe with lots of fonts have been insistence on making 1-l-I confusable

the problem there isn't only in making characters distinct - but it's about not confusing one for another "in a vacuum", by itself

this font succeeded in making `I` unique - but `l` still looks like "one"

I wish people copied discord's font in this instance - remove bottom serifs altogether and replace with a slanted end

binary1322• 9 months ago

I really appreciate that the symbols are clear and well-aligned but I do not find the font very attractive or legible unfortunately. I like the Go Mono font though so maybe it’s a “me” problem. :)

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

thanks for the feedback. i'd like to think it's just a preference issue.

i didn't know about Go Mono. it looks alright but monospace serifs are probably not for me.

binary1322• 9 months ago

de gustibus…. :)

It definitely helps differentiate similar-looking glyphs!

iambvk• 9 months ago

My favorite monospace font is "Ubuntu Mono" for ages.

As an engineer, I like to see -- for the lack of better word -- some taste instead of characters being too formal and too symmetric. Ubuntu and Ubuntu-Mono satisfy this to a good extent without being too much, like in comic sans.

The closest font with similar taste, which I found recently is Mononoki

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

Ubuntu Mono is great. many glyphs in Myna are directly borrowed from Ubuntu Mono, just more condensed and better aligned.

globular-toast4• 9 months ago

I've also been using Ubuntu Mono for ages. Must be 15 years now! I have tried many other fonts, just to see if I'd enjoy a change, but the most jarring thing is how much space all other fonts seem to have. Ubuntu Mono gives me way more lines on screen, without setting the font size far too small. Is the "condensed" property that is being mentioned in this thread? I've asked about this before but nobody has ever said "condensed".

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

yes, indeed. "condensed" means smaller width and less space between characters, in general. it allows for slightly more code to be shown on the screen horizontally.

nielsbot2• 9 months ago

Meta, but I've personally switched to a proportional font for my coding. Heresy, I know, but it feels wrong to have to look at code as if I'm coding on an 80 column terminal in 1960.

Input Sans is great:

https://input.djr.com

eviks15• 9 months ago

Great, but it unfortunately breaks vertical alignment with elastic tabstops solution still missing everywhere

https://nick-gravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/

nielsbot2• 9 months ago

If you use spaces for vertical alignment, then yes things don't vertically align.

But I've sacrificed vertical alignment for a more human-friendly code appearance :)

eviks15• 9 months ago

Are you frustrated that -> looks nothing like an arrow

The proper solution is, of course, to allow ←arrows→ (and, naturally, not trying to fit a variable peg into a monowidth whole)... maybe in the next generation of languages when the bottom level of typesetting quality is raised a bit

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

i have addressed this in one of the other comments. it is impossible to achieve both elegance (good look) and consistency (monospace width) in these cases. many folks, like yourself, are pioneering full Unicode editing. we, on the other end, are just trying to make editing without ligatures elegant because ASCII, i believe, would remain predominant for a long time to come.

eviks15• 9 months ago

well, my "pioneering efforts" :) are killed by language designers, as you note "it is impossible", so we can only waste time looking for various workarounds like using fonts designed around those limits...

IshKebab• 9 months ago

I kind of think monospacing is overrated in programming. Sroustrup typeset the entire of The C++ Programming Language in variable width font and it looks totally fine. I've used variable width fonts in my editor a fair bit too.

I think the main problem with it is you need to use tabs for indentation and unfortunately spaces comprehensively won that battle. IMO that's because although tabs are clearly better, spaces are definitely more idiot-friendly and there are a lot of idiots in the world - or at least people who don't give a shit about nice formatting. So large tab based codebases tended to end up with a horrible mix of tabs and spaces.

helix278• 9 months ago

Ligatures exist

eviks15• 9 months ago

and don't solve the spacing issue, also: I see an →, so I type one in my search box, but can't find anything since it's not an arrow, but a fake replacement of -> Or I press Shift+Right to select it, but can't, need to repeat it 3 times because again, it was a long arrow, not a single symbol. Then, of course, they could do a replacement in y our comments where you meant literal symbols, not an arrow...

seanmcdirmid• 9 months ago

Typesetting doesn’t really get better until you use proportional fonts for programming. At least in my experience, I know this is controversial since proportional fonts don’t allow for ascii art.

rbanffy5• 9 months ago

I love when people make their own fonts (I make one myself), but I wish they had more unique personalities. These days it’s hard to tell one programming font from another.

stOneskull• 9 months ago

i'd like one with more extreme braces. a lot of the time, my old eyes find it hard to tell them apart from parentheses. i like OP's font but braces are looking like brackets now.

rbanffy5• 9 months ago

My eyes miss the 14” 80x25 green phosphor of the IBM 3278.

piekvorst• 9 months ago

I don’t get why should programming fonts be necessarily monospaced.

abdulhaq2• 9 months ago

That's a fair question, for one thing white space is often important and sometimes very important, so we need spacing to be very clear. Also it can be useful to have vertical alignment to indicate a pattern in the code or data.

PaulHoule• 9 months ago

It’s got some of the feel of a 3270 font while still being really different.

bityard• 9 months ago

I think one thing you are running into here in the HN comments is that ligatures as they relate to source code editing can be somewhat controversial among developers who are especially vocal about their preferences.

Some people believe that ligatures make source code more readable. Even, perhaps, beautiful or "comfy."

Others feel that past a certain point, programming font choice doesn't really matter much and that too much time spent sharpening the saw means you never get around to cutting the wood. Or that hiding two physical symbols behind a single logical one for the sake of aesthetics is somewhere between pointless and dishonest.

Still others are of the opinion that we wouldn't need ligatures at all if programming languages understood Unicode. The other problem of course being that most of us don't have Unicode keyboards.

Your project seems to have somehow managed to upset all three camps and for that, I salute you and have starred your project on GitHub.

Aurornis4• 9 months ago

I think one thing you are running into here in the HN comments is that ligatures as they relate to source code editing can be somewhat controversial among developers who are especially vocal about their preferences

It’s easy to toggle ligatures on or off in the common editors. A lot of fonts have them, but they’re opt-in. Nobody gets alienated.

codazoda• 9 months ago

Looks pretty nice. I could download and try it but one character I find missing, from the sample, is emdash. I wrote a lot of markdown and many programming typefaces get emdash wrong (it’s hard to tell from a regular dash).

Looks like I’ll have to install this to see if it’s the case here.

BTW, I find the screenshots for this font quite a bit more useful in evaluating it than any of the other fonts referenced in the HN comments here. These help you decide at a glance.

sayyadirfanali39• 9 months ago

thanks for the feedback. i think the em-dash is not very different in case of this font too. i made the (en-)dash so wide that there was no way to disambiguate within fixed-width constraints. i don't use em-dash at all, so there was no need to disambiguate too.

if you want to use it but em-dash is the only deal-breaker, please try it once and raise a feature request. i'd see what we can change to make it work.

gjm11• 9 months ago

You're absolutely correct! The em-dash isn't just another character—it's the foundation of good writing style. Would you like me to show you some examples of how important em-dashes are for good writing?

(Sorry.)

abdulhaq2• 9 months ago

lol

fsckboy• 9 months ago

Myna tries to emulate the smooth look of ligatures but also retains the simplicity of ASCII

this sentence makes no sense, ASCII is something like a code page and ligatures are something like glyphs

peter_d_sherman• 9 months ago

Observation:

Most programming languages evolved from the limited selection of ASCII printable characters from the keys of early ASCII keyboards (which evolved from earlier typewriters and teletype machines)...

But these days we have Unicode -- a huge amount of potential symbols (and combinations of symbols!) that could be used in new programming languages (i.e., asterisk: '*', long used for multiplication could (finally!) be replaced with a true multiplication symbol: 'x' -- if an extended symbol space were used by the language...

Symbols could visually represent such things as loops, conditionals, variable declarations, etc., etc.

Pointers and pointer dereferencing (if the language supported it) -- could have their own symbols...

Would that be a good idea?

Well, if backwards ASCII compatibility is desired to run on old computers for whatever reason (in a future time when we need to revert back to older/simpler/more predictable systems because the AI's are out of control?) then maybe not...

But if we wanted graphical or quasi-graphical symbols to represent programming constructs more visually -- then maybe the idea has some merit...

Maybe a conversion program could be written that would convert between the new symbol set and ASCII, and maybe the programming language would be created to recognize both constructs...

And yes, I know that there is the Scratch programming language -- but I'm not talking about quite that visual! :-) The language I envision would still be physically typed on a keyboard, as most are today...

Anyway, great looking typeface!

edem2• 9 months ago

does this support ligatures? or is it designed in a way that you dont need them?

Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

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