Microsoft's Latest Open-Source Contribution: A New Font For Terminals & Code Editors

[moriel5]

I don't really understand much about fonts (I used to just use the defaults, and not really pay much attention to how the characters looked), however ever since slightly after starting to use Solus, a few years ago, my preferred font is Clear Sans, and relatively recently also paying attention to sizes, hinting and antialiasing (it looks the same to me with our without hinting and/or antialiasing, however that is probably due to my choice of font sizes) and mono fonts (hey, I also use the terminal on an almost hourly basis, it's comfortable for many things), my favorite combination today is Clear Sans Regular, size 9 for everything but the interface, which is at size 8, and Monospace Regular, size 9 for monospace fields, with text scaling set to 1.

I wish there was a mono font that looked just like Monospace Regular, but also supported ligatures (though libVTE and Gnome Terminal will first need to properly support them for me to be able to make use of them).
Fira is nice (It fits pretty well in Firefox OS, which I absolutely love (sans a few design choices), despite it not being in development for at least two years, and it not giving me the tools I need (which can be rectified if there is enough coding skills, though I would like an open-source fork to be made specifically to revive old and weak phones, though almost completely for offline usage).

[Ropid]

Looks nice enough but I do not like the "programmer ligatures and glyph combining". ->, != get changed to weird characters. This will make selecting them or changing them awkward (have to delete the whole thing to change one character).
I'm sure it is another one of those things that is great for amateurs but when used in anger under deadlines it just slows you down.

You misunderstood how those kinds of ligatures work:

Those ligatures are just for the font renderer. The changed glyph is only visible on the screen. In the actual text, your "->" or "!=" is still two text characters. In your editor, you can target each of the characters with the cursor and change them individually.

For use in vim, you would need a terminal that supports these kinds of ligatures. You will not see the ligatures in urxvt or a vte based terminal. It works in Konsole and kitty.

[torsionbar28]

No fonts can beat Dejavu Sans Mono for me. After trying different ones, I always go back to the Dejavu.

Woah, me too, and every time I switch back to it, I get this weird feeling like I've been there before.

[dovla091]

How cool. It is almost as usefull as that Office assistant Clippy, perhaps they should create that for Linux...., oh wait, they did not create office for it, so it's a no go... :P

[perpetually high]

While we're on the subject and since I mentioned Droid Sans Mono earlier for terminal, IBM Plex Mono Medium is my go-to for code editing. Beautiful font.

Screenshot here

[FeRD_NYC]

It's not hateful, TBH. THE 1, l, L, and l are all visually distinct (which is where Consolas fails, with its crap lowercase-ell), and the 4 and 7 are a nice touch. I even like the "interestingly"-shaped c and C, where normally I loathe such flourishes.

[FeRD_NYC]

While we're on the subject and since I mentioned Droid Sans Mono earlier for terminal, IBM Plex Mono Medium is my go-to for code editing. Beautiful font.

ZOMG NO. Or, answer this question: Why did you name your theme "Solarf1are"?: #ConsolasAllOverAgain

[Vistaus]

IBM Plex Mono (Semibold) was my favorite, but this one made me switch (at least to try it out for a while because it looks really good!)! Thanks, Microsoft!

[Vistaus]

Nothing beats Comic sans

Sans != Mono

[Vistaus]

DejaVu looks like the kerning is a bit ick, such as "srv". Cascadia sort of looks like the kerning is handled well but the tracking(I think it's called?) looks really tight, so the readability is hampered a bit by squishing letters too closely. "root" also feels a bit weird with the "o" height, other than that I'm a bit biased as the style of Cascadia glyphs don't appeal to me.

Droid really does look much nicer and readable from those screenshots, thanks for the comparison images!

I hate fonts that squish letters closely, but Cascadia Code is well-spaced, at least in my terminal.