Developer Creates Delightful Programming Font Based on Minecraft

North Carolina-based developer Idrees Hassan loves Minecraft so much that he recently created a monospaced font for programming based on the typeface found in the wildly popular video game. The result, Monocraft, gives programmers the feel of being in Minecraft without using any assets from the game. From a report: "To be honest, I made this font because I thought it'd be fun to learn how fonts worked," Hassan told Ars. "Existing Minecraft fonts were missing a bunch of small details like proper kerning and pixel size, so I figured I should make my own. Once that was done, there was nothing stopping me from going overboard and turning it into a 'proper' programming font. Plus, now I can write Minecraft plugins in a Minecraft font!" To adapt the Minecraft font for development purposes, Hassan redesigned characters to look better in a monospaced format, added a few serifs to make letters such as "i" and "l" easier to distinguish, created new programming ligature characters, and refined the arrow characters to make them easier to read. (Ligature characters combine popular operational character strings such as "!=" into a single new character, but they aren't always popular with developers.)

A for effort.

[Fly Swatter]

But F for scaled up pixelation.

-what's old is new again

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[Xenx]

It's authentic! Not saying I'd love to use it, but I do like it for what it is.

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[drinkypoo]

Is that an F, or a P? I'm using 10 point Monoscape in my browser.

It's delightful to have a font which looks like this, but only for if I want to make minecraft memes. Using it for programming would be bananas.

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[iNaya]

I am bananas, so that sounds like the perfect font for my programming :-)

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[nospam007]

"But F for scaled up pixelation.

-what's old is new again"

My thought exactly, I thought: Wow the font from my CGA monitor!

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[caseih]

Speaking of old DOS screen fonts, in my mind it's hard to beat the legibility of the good old 9x16 IBM VGA font. Yes VGA text mode really was 720x480. I've not yet joined the modern-day present and still have a 24" monitor that's only 1920x1200. At these resolutions, my favorite programming font is a TTF rendition of the IBM VGA text mode font, called "Less Perfect DOS VGA." At 12 points the characters are exactly 9x16 pixels. And I have to say they look great. If I get a 4k monitor, though, that will

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[tlhIngan]

Speaking of old DOS screen fonts, in my mind it's hard to beat the legibility of the good old 9x16 IBM VGA font. Yes VGA text mode really was 720x480. I've not yet joined the modern-day present and still have a 24" monitor that's only 1920x1200. At these resolutions, my favorite programming font is a TTF rendition of the IBM VGA text mode font, called "Less Perfect DOS VGA." At 12 points the characters are exactly 9x16 pixels. And I have to say they look great. If I get a 4k monitor, though, that will be to

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[chthon]

I think I had the same fonts on my ZX Spectrum...

Just reinvented the

[Tablizer]

...dot-matrix printer.

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[OrangeTide]

I upgraded my 9-pin to 24-pin and never looked back.

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[Tablizer]

I remember some 9-pinners would use the trick of shifting half a pixel for a second pass to add resolution. I'd draft using single-pass mode and print the final copy in 2-pass mode.

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[drinkypoo]

My panasonic would do that, but only for text. Really nice output, though.

Not monospaced

[gweihir]

The example has chars that are 2 and 3 spaces wide. WTF?

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[drinkypoo]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

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[gweihir]

Yes, so? You do not have ligatures that are several spaces wide in monospaced fonts. Incidentally, when you look at the example, you find these are arrows and mathematical symbols, so not ligatures either. The only way to do ligatures in monospaced is to put the two chars into one space. As that usually does not work, it is rarely done.

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[drinkypoo]

apparently you do in this case. it's in tfa. there's no reason they shouldn't work in a monospaced font any more than a variable width one. not my bag for programming, though. seems dumb for that.

Evil ligature usage

[Khopesh]

The second and third else if clauses show off the font's custom ligatures [github.com], with != turning into a not-equals sign. Cute, but that will get confused with U+2260, Unicode's own glyph for not-equal-to. The same goes for not-identical (U+2262) versus the !== glyph in the third clause.

This might make sense for programming languages that are restricted to ASCII, but it seems dangerous for others like JavaScript (though JS doesn't actually support using U+2260 as an operator ... yet?).

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[OrangeTide]

Fira Code has basically the same problem with != and =/= showing up very similar to U+2260. You can turn off the ligatures and normally you're configure that based on the type of source file you're viewing. Theoretically you could define a symbol in Go as U+2260 and it wouldn't function as an operator (I did not try it), that might be a little surprising but shouldn't break the language.

That font is shit

[UnknownSoldier]

Certain glyphs are utter garbage. Uppercase A, B, E, F, G, H, P, R, S, X are unbalanced or what is known as bad X-Height [dtc-wsuv.org]

Here is an example of how to fix it. [imgur.com]

Delightful if you're into Minecraft

[Tony Isaac]

For the rest of us, a pain.

It reminds me of when Comic Sans came out. EVERYBODY used Comic Sans everywhere, because it was "so cool" to use a font that looked like handwriting. It got old really, really fast. I personally don't want to use a font that looks like it came out of a game, I want to use one that's easy to scan, easy to read, has clearly-defined symbols, and doesn't look like a typewriter.

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[yuriklastalov]

Sounds like you'd love this: https://dtinth.github.io/comic... [github.io]

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[Tony Isaac]

NOOOOOOOOO!

My MSX home computer had that in 1984

[thesjaakspoiler]

But I guess many super cool dudes were just not around back then.

It's the ZX Spectrum font.

[master_p]

We used this (or a similar) font for BASIC programming around 40 years ago, in the home computer 'ZX Spectrum'.

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[airport76]

Actually, the closest font I can remember is that on the Apple II. Only Apple's looks so much better.

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[Tablizer]

It's funny to watch young whippersnappers reinvent things that have been around before and say, "look how smart & inventy I am!". Oh the view from geezerhood.

Looks like my favorite old X font

[Cyrano de Maniac]

While certainly not identical, this looks very similar to the good-ol' Schumacher "screen-medium-r-normal" font I used for years. On current Linux distributions it's so dang hard to find and enable the Schumacher fonts that I've finally given up, but it was good for the couple decades I used it.

% grep font ~/.Xdefaults
XTerm*VT100*font: -*-screen-medium-r-normal--14-*-*-*-m-70-iso8859-1

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[malinkastrong]

That's pretty interesting, and I can't stop getting amazed by all the things people develop on the internet. Not so long ago, I decided to come up with something as well, and thanks to beter live - beter [beter.co], it wasn't problematic for me to develop a pretty good gambling platform and make a living that way.