A new free and open source monospace font has been released by software development powerhouse JetBrains.
Their typographic creation is called (surprise) JetBrains Mono and, they claim, it makes reading code much kinder on the eyes.
Admittedly it feels a bit like everyone has their own monospace font these days: IBM released ‘Plex’ in 2017; Microsoft has launched ‘Casacida; and even Ubuntu has its own one for when you need to get up close with the command line.
But with JetBrains being — apologies in advance, you knew this obvious pun was coming — the brains behind some of the world’s best-loved development and code creation tools, it kinda makes sense for them to have their own one too, doesn’t it?
And lo: the creation of JetBrains Mono.
JetBrains Mono Font
Because we read code in a different way to standard text in a box (i.e. with code our eyes move vertically as well as horizontally, and irregularly) JetBrains Mono was crafted with reading speed, comprehension, legibility and, yes, eye fatigue in mind.
“We have considered things like the size and shape of letters; the amount of space between them, a balance naturally engineered in monospace fonts; unnecessary details and unclear distinctions between symbols, such as I’s and l’s for example; and programming ligatures when developing our font,” they say.
Their font certainly looks taller than Consolas at 13px — and dare I say less fuzzy too (compression excepted in the image above).
13px is the recommended font size, while line spacing is suggested at 1.2.
This technical finesse is thread throughout the entire construction of the JetBrains Mono, with attention being given to the needs, issues, and impressions of people writing and reading code daily above ‘ooh, that looks good’.
The font comes in a variety of weights (including italic, medium, bold and extra bold) and supports (as of writing) code ligatures, diacritics, and cyrillic across 143 languages.
Pretty nice, eh?
The font is supplied as .tff you can be installed pretty much everywhere and anywhere (including Ubuntu; tenuous link unlocked).
Do note that if you’re running the most recent version of the JetBrains IDE (many available via the Snapcraft store) then you should (in theory) already the new font.