Font Comparison: Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono vs. JetBrains Mono and Fira Code

I was hoping to see some comparisons of blocks of English text, and blocks of program code text, rather than just character by character. That would help me understand how it feels to read in arbitrary blocks, as well as appreciate specific design characteristics.

I would link to the downloads in the opening paragraph.

My impression is that while legible it is too fat. You'll notice that Fira Code and JetBrains Mono are similarly wide -- and narrower than Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono.

Character distinction isn't that important when reading english mainly because context automatically repairs any s1m1l4r1t1es b3tw33n w0rd5. Even numbers can be used the replace letters and it only slows down reading slightly. Leetspeak is only a worst case example. For example for b0Ok 0 and O causes virtually no pause.

This legibility vs readability distinction is why variable-width programming fonts like Proportional or Input Sans can actually reduce cognitive load during extended coding sessions despite sacrificing character grid alignment.

Good observation, legibilty is not the same as readability. Hyperlegible fonts are used in places where it is crucial that the readers can identify the correct characters and/or short words – even if the readability suffers slightly.

Readable fonts are for longer form texts where the flow of reading is more important than correctly identfying individual characters.

Both have valid use cases and there are fonts who mange to do both pretty well.

As an Urdu speaker I love the Nastaliq font for its ability to give each word its own unique shape. When alphabets are knitted together, it doesn't just change total width of the word, it changes total height as well. Found a random website with urdu text in image form https://wp.nyu.edu/virtualurdu/the-clever-bird/

I agree, and can imagine using a different font depending on the (programming) language or purpose, yet each font being quite objectively better at that purpose. Some languages are a lot more similar to natural language, and some are more mathematical, technical or really need fixed width blocks to be readable.

And then there are fonts that I don't like aesthetically and generally avoid, but come to the rescue in the wee hours of the morning when you really have to get something done and your eyes have gone blurry.

Interesting distinction there. I didn't know that was the difference between legibility and readability. I'd really like to hear more about this. Do you have experience with fonts that strike a better balance, or know of reading material that discusses this subject in more detail?

Do you think Atkinson Hyperlegible specifically hurts readability?

I am thinking about the regular one on text, not mono on code.

I fully agree that proportional fonts are nicer to read, even for code. When I tried to use it, I got annoyed by Go, which autoformats code with spaces to align stuff and that looks very ugly with a proportional font. The solution would be elastic tabstops [1], but that seems just to be a concept without actual support in any editor.

[1] https://nick-gravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/

If you use a true proportional font, you give up aligning code elements other than basic indentation. For most people, that's too much to give up.

I do like quasi-proportional fonts like Iosevka Aile, where very wide or very narrow characters are allowed something more like their natural widths. I think, though I'm not sure, that the widths are worked out so that "Wl" (wide + narrow) is the same length as "xx" (2 x normal), for example. My experience using Iosevka Aile in Emacs is that things usually-but-not-always align like they're supposed to, which is a better trade-off than fully proportional fonts.

You might also like monospace fonts with "smart kerning" as available with Commit Mono font. https://commitmono.com

Check out the Acme editor from Plan 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)#/media/File...

Typos feel way harder to spot in proportional fonts. Maybe because proportional fonts are easier to read so your brain subconsciously ignores them. And typos, like a misplaced or forgotten comma, can cause some of the most annoying bugs. Also, most editors still mostly operate on individual characters. With a fixed width font I can immediately see how many cursor up and cursor left commands I need to send to move the cursor to a specific position in the text.

> Why don't we embrace proportional (i.e. not monospace) fonts more for coding? IMHO, they are a big step up when it comes to legibility.

No, according to what seems to be the common definitions in this thread (dunno if that's the "official" one, or if such a thing even exists), they're better for readability, not legibility. And I agree with user bjourne's comment[1], "Typos feel way harder to spot in proportional fonts." What we need for coding is mainly legibility, not readability.

Well, at least usually, while writing and editing. For getting an overview of a large codebase, the increased readability of a proportional font might be better. (So what we really need may be a quick way to switch our editor or IDE between proportional and non-proportional fonts.)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44654792

You know, I've heard this idea about proportional fonts before and have been intrigued by the idea. I use Neovim running inside Alacritty as my code editor, though, so unsure if it'll work for me or not.

Going to check that font out - thank you for the suggestion. :)

> You can't use it for a terminal of course

That is the problem, though. I edit with neovim inside of wezterm. The few times I've seen proportional used for code, I've thought that it looked interesting but realistically, I live in a vt100 universe and all things considered, it's really not that bad.

I'm interested in Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono as a programming font. I think monospaced is a defining characteristic of programming fonts. Basically, legibility is just different for programming and text (although I clearly read too much Verdana).

Yeah, where there's Berkeley Mono, there are no alternatives. I love that font, and use it everywhere.

Same here. No other font comes close to it in terms of readability. I really don't care about what each font claims about in terms of achiveness. As long as it's not pleasing to me, its not worth for me.

I love this font! It's very well worth the price.

yep! I just got it the other day. I upgraded to get the variants but I quickly settled on the Regular which is included with $75 Dev license. It's amazing even using it for non-code like in Obsidian.

Come here to say the same...expensive but worths it

Me too. I can't use anything other than Monaco.

Adding to the list of 'this is what I am using', I have switched both terminal and code editor to Maple Mono[1]. Which, looking at TFA, seems to be somewhat similar in spirit as Atkinson Hyperlegible, although I haven't used that.

Maple has many ligatures, I personally like the hypervisible [TODO]. Overall I find it very legible, even on small sizes, and pleasing also for writing e.g. in Markdown.

[1] https://font.subf.dev/en/ / https://github.com/subframe7536/maple-font

Iosevka is the most terminaly of the modern vector programming fonts, outside of perhaps Terminus. I set my Emacs to use it, as I haven't been able to find a font that comes anywhere near as comfortable.

For me, it's because it messes with my expectations of where my cursor will go when I move it over the ligatured characters and what will happen when I edit them. It's very jarring to delete one character and see the character(s) next to it change.

There is also something to be said for each character being the instructions for how you type it. How to type “->”? Press - then >. With ligatures, that goes out the window, and at least for me, I have to quickly look up in my memory how to type ≥ or ⟹.

That said I do very much like Commit Mono’s “smart kerning”, where characters are adjusted slightly based on the characters surrounding them. I guess you could call it a soft version of ligatures. For instance, when an m is between two i‘s, the i‘s get pushed away a tad to give the m a bit more room to breathe. Similarly, when you type an ellipses (...), the dots get pushed ever so slightly closer together than they would be naively.

Nothing stops you from simply not enabling that font feature, user config is also not a bug

This is why I like 0xProto font. It has ligatures for a nice clean look, but preserves a little bit of spacing between characters so they're still legible as individual characters. It's also very readable and legible overall, with nice proportions.

And ligatures are a must for me because I find that symbols don't line up nicely in a ton of fonts and it annoys me a lot.

wezterm gives you the option to ligature or not to ligature.

  config.harfbuzz_features = { 'calt=0', 'clig=0', 'liga=0' }

it's also inconvenient for Norwegians and Danes, since Ø is part of our alphabet. Slightly jealous of Sweden since they write it like Ö instead... Either way, big fan of dotted zeros for that reason.

Yeah, dot in the middle is the best option, also better aligns with the whole circular concept of the glyph as opposed to the straight slash line

Looks like a great, functional font. I'm also a fan of Adobe Source Code Mono, but the look and feel of Berkeley Mono just wiped the floor of all these professional and well designed fonts.

IBM's Plex Mono also a great contender for a "professional" programming font.

I switched to it after more than 12 years with Consolas, expecting to quickly get bored of it, like every other time I had a brief affair with a different font. But One Mono stuck!

I also found this and actually made it the default for an application I author with a few thousand users. Well it turned out jetbrains mono didn't support chinese characters so I broke my app for a proportion of my user base. I had to revert it. Also it can add seconds to load time. Just a warning as I think a few people on hn will make tools for others. I still set it as my own font.

Yes, same for me. I tried many fonts over the years and I settled on Comic Code and JetBrains Mono. I use one for code editors and the other for CLIs.