JetBrains has launched a font called Mono. Officially, Mono is a programming font designed for developers to improve their experience when reviewing code.

JetBrains also explains why they created Mono. Because developers spend most of their time looking at the code, they spend their time looking for the “best” font for the best reading experience. But JetBrains believes that most of these popular fonts don’t take into account the difference between read-through code and plain reading, which can lead to dry eyes… They decided to create a font that made it easier for everyone to use the code.

When looking at code, the developer’s eyes move quickly across the screen (the eyes need to move vertically and horizontally at all times), so it’s easy to get tired, whereas when reading, the eyes usually move in the same direction, which is relatively easy. In the beginning of Mono typeface design team, therefore, fully considering the access code for a long time can cause eye fatigue problems, and the affected factors, such as the size and shape of the letters, the amount of space as wide, natural balance, unnecessary details, even the word, and it is difficult to distinguish between symbols, or letters (l and I), and even the word.

Let’s take a look at what the Mono font looks like. It looks like this in different programming languages:

Kotlin

Java

Go

Python

In fact, when I first saw the Mono font, I couldn’t tell the difference between it and the Consolas font because I wasn’t so sensitive to fonts.

▲ Comparison of JetBrains Mono and Consolas fonts

At first glance, the difference between the two is small, but the font test is the control of detail, although Mono looks plain, in fact, there are a lot of hidden tricks.

The Mono font has increased the height of lowercase letters while maintaining the standard width of characters, so that more pixels are used for each letter, which helps improve rendering.

In addition, the Mono font removes a lot of unnecessary details to keep the text clear when the font is small. What’s more, the simpler the type, the faster the eyes perceive it and the easier it is to recognize it.

Here are a few examples of confusing users. In this case, the Mono font has also been optimized to make it easier for developers to distinguish.

While the Mono font has many advantages, the 143 languages it supports do not have Chinese, so display support for Chinese may not be great. Oh, and Mono is an open source, free font that can be used for any commercial or non-commercial use.

use

If you are using the latest version of JetBrains IDE, you can set the Mono font directly in it. If you are using an older version or another IDE, you will need to manually download the font installation. >>> Click here to get the download address

P.S. has not been used yet, so I cannot provide any feedback. If you are interested, please download and try it out. We always say “JetBrains, must be great”. Hope it doesn’t flip this time:)

A link to the

  • JetBrains Mono: Check it out
  • JetBrains Mono can be downloaded here

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