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Intel Programming

Intel Open Sources New 'One Mono' Font for Programmers (github.com) 51

Posted by EditorDavid from the to-the-letter dept.
Intel has announced Intel One Mono, a new font catering to "the needs of developers" with an "expressive" monospace for clarity and legibility" It's easier to read, and available for free, with an open-source font license.

Identifying the typographically underserved low-vision developer audience, Frere-Jones Type designed the Intel One Mono typeface in partnership with the Intel Brand Team and VMLY&R, for maximum legibility to address developers' fatigue and eyestrain and reduce coding errors. A panel of low-vision and legally blind developers provided feedback at each stage of design.
The Linux blog OMG! Ubuntu calls the new font "pretty decent," adding that "Between IBM Plex Mono, Hack, Fira Code, and JetBrains Mono I think we Linux users are spoilt for choice when it comes to open-source monospace fonts that look good and work great.

"Still, there's always room for more, right...?" Better yet, it's not only free to download and use but free to edit, and free to redistribute... Overall, I think Intel One Mono looks great, especially in a text editor (GUI or CLI). There's a noticeable upper and lower margin to the font that in dense text situations allows text to breathe, but in some terminal tools, like Neofetch, the gaps can seem a bit too happy.
The Intel One Mono repository on GitHub includes instructions for activating the font in VSCode and Sublime Text, and lists some extra features accessible in some applications and via CSS:
  • There is an option for a raised colon, either applied contextually between numbers or activated generally.
  • Superior/superscript and inferior/subscript figures are included via their Unicode codepoints, or you can produce them from the default figures via the sups (Superscript), subs (Subscript), and si (Scientific Inferior) features.
  • Fraction numerals are similarly available via the numr (Numerator) and dnom (Denominator) features. A set of premade fractions is also available in the fonts.

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Intel Open Sources New 'One Mono' Font for Programmers More

Intel Open Sources New 'One Mono' Font for Programmers

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  • Let's Have a Look (Score:5, Interesting)

    by walkerp1 ( 523460 ) on Saturday June 10, 2023 @11:06AM (#63591300)
    Nice, a new font to test out. Lately I've been doing a lot of terminal work and the Cascadia Code font that showed up recently has been pleasant, but it doesn't look as good in VS. My old eyes appreciate the efforts of the font developers to help us avoid undue eyestrain, and I'm not locked into any particular typeface if another will serve me better.
  • The sample on github actually looks to be worth trying. They have done a good job on the lower case ell and maybe on g/q descender distinction. The curly braces look like bat wings, but not in a bad way. The ampersand and dollar sign are a bit strange, but in a way that should help to disambiguate from other characters. Also, WTF is Neofetch? Another Bushnell hype for a shoddy robotic dog with a $30 replaceable WiFi tennis ball to catch and profitably lose?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Looking at the sample code in TFA, it doesn't look great to me.

      I'm not expert but I think the lines are not high enough. They look compressed and that makes the outlines of the characters and the words less clear.

      I think some of the characters are a bit wide too. The think characters like i and l are better being narrow, even with monospace it helps differentiate them. It looks less visually pleasing, but for coding I want readability.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        its almost like font choice is a subjective, aesthetic and personal choice

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kiick ( 102190 )

      Yes, you can clearly distinguish ILl1| as well as oO0 - something many mono fonts get wrong. The quotes are a little off however: it's hard to tell without comparison which is the back quote. And the double quotes are slanted for some reason, which looks wrong when used at both ends of a quotation.

      Honestly, you'd think designing a readable font was hard or something...

      • Keep also in mind that impairments vary. Astigmatism can defocus lines on some axes, while other axes remain in focus. Cataract can give fog, reducing all contrast differences, and resolution of fine detail. From an earlier comment, when my vision was better I favored small screen and print fonts to allow visual grasp of a greater range of code or logs.

  • Pretty good. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Saturday June 10, 2023 @11:21AM (#63591320)

    I was using "Source Code Pro" which is an excellent font but I see advantages to "One Mono". From the start, you can see that the curly braces are much easier to distinguish from parenthesis though they do look a bit odd at first glance. I also noticed the exclamation is distinctive and the comma is easier to recognize.

    I'm gonna use it.

    • I'm gonna use it.

      I'd like to second that. I've switched Terminal and Code to it, and my aging eyes are appreciating its legibility at small point sizes.

  • It wasn't always this way (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Saturday June 10, 2023 @11:37AM (#63591354)

    Linux users are spoilt for choice when it comes to open-source monospace fonts that look good and work great.

    Back in the day, one of the first things I always had to do after installing a new Linux instance was install a copy of "LUTRS14.FON" that I had appropriated from Windows.

    I guess that the date that the TrueType patent expired should be remembered as a banner day in history.

  • I'm still using Fixedsys all these years later. As a bitmap font it is crisper and clearer, and being a little chunky helps make it clearer IMO.

    • I use Fixedsys as well, it is very readable to me, works both black on white and white on black and the characters are all different. It also looks good.

    • Finally had to give up Fixedsys, as Windows refuses to scale it on a high-DPI display. It's insane that nobody has created a genuine TTF equivalent. I've tried dozens, they are all different in subtle (and usually stupid) ways.

    • A person of culture, I see. I adore Fixedsys post retinal damage. Can't see shit on most other fonts.
    • I have been using courier new for 30+ years.. although I use whatever the default is in Visual Studio Code.

      Fixedsys is a good choice too.

  • But I'll try this one out for a while, see if I like it. It always feels a bit "off" when I first switch to a different font...

  • The old VGA font works the best for my eyes (Score:4, Interesting)

    by caseih ( 160668 ) on Saturday June 10, 2023 @01:57PM (#63591676)

    I've tried a lot of different fonts for terminal and programming work but I keep coming back to a truetype version of a font many of us old guys know and love. The IBM VGA BIOS font that was the standard for text mode MS-DOS for decades. At 2k and 4k resolutions the font would have to be scaled (and it's not designed to be a vector scalable font) but that's okay. At 1900x1200 it looks great on my screen. Small but very readable. I like the heavier look.

    https://laemeur.sdf.org/fonts/ [sdf.org]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by caseih ( 160668 )

      Another similar font that's more scalable is https://www.dafont.com/nouveau... [dafont.com] . But not sure how it looks on a high dpi screen at readable point sizes.

    • Re:The old VGA font works the best for my eyes (Score:4, Informative)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot.worf@net> on Saturday June 10, 2023 @04:13PM (#63591962)

      I've tried a lot of different fonts for terminal and programming work but I keep coming back to a truetype version of a font many of us old guys know and love. The IBM VGA BIOS font that was the standard for text mode MS-DOS for decades. At 2k and 4k resolutions the font would have to be scaled (and it's not designed to be a vector scalable font) but that's okay. At 1900x1200 it looks great on my screen. Small but very readable. I like the heavier look.

      I use the VGA font as well - I've added it to every editor I have as it helps make perfect distinction between 0(zero) and O (capital o) as well as several other characters. I use a TrueType version so it can be scaled and even has extended Unicode characters because of the world we live in. Plus, they are nice a "fat" so no big monospace fonts with thin lines making it hard to read.

      The only problem is the site has a million different fonts because on PCs, the fonts were stored in a character ROM and thus all were all so slightly different. But The IBM 9x16 VGA font (Unicode is +Plus edition) is installed on all the machines I have.

      https://int10h.org/oldschool-p... [int10h.org]

      Scaled up it loses its "blockiness" but still reminds you of the font.

    • The older fonts, IMO, knew where it was at. Who'd have thought we'd be relying on them after so long.

  • alternatives (Score:3)

    by ceg97 ( 976736 ) on Saturday June 10, 2023 @01:58PM (#63591682)
    Some other good developer fonts are DejaVu Sans, and Jet Brains Mono. But I'll give the Intel a try.
  • That was available as a typeball on their Selectric typewriters.

    And yeah, I'm an oldfart.

  • But it is no Liberation sans v.1, but then no font is. The closest still in maintained is Cousine

  • You can have my misc-fonts when you pry them from my cold dead hands.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Burdell ( 228580 )

      I used the classic 6x13 (aka "fixed", the font compiled into the X server as the default/fall-back) for a really long time (just over 30 years). I like the narrower look, I can see more without moving my eyes I guess. I classified displays by how many 80-column xterms with 6x13 I could get side-by-side on the screen. :)

      However, higher DPI monitors obsoleted it (and all bitmap fonts really). I doubled it to 12x26 for one display, but a newer and even higher-DPI monitor just left it behind (I tried various ot

  • Far too much line spacing for my taste. My favourite terminal//coding font is Agave [github.com] (but the Nerd Fonts [nerdfonts.com] version, of course).
  • I have been using Iosevka lately which I find to be very pleasing to my eyeballs. Haven't seen it mentioned in the comments yet, but give it a try! https://typeof.net/Iosevka/ [typeof.net]

  • The ampersand indeed looks a bit odd as someone mentioned. I guess they aim to distinguish it stronger from an 8?
    The only change *I* would make is remove the foot on which the 1 is standing. What is a point in distinguishing capital I from lowercase eL if the 1 just looks *nearly* the same as a capital I?

    On the other hand, years ago I started to basically remove all syntax highlighting, at least most of the colours and only activate italic, bold and underline.

    There is no real point for me that every line of

  • Lots of annoying letter combinations with weird spacing. Hack and Cousine are much, much, much better.

  • I spent a long time searching for a decent terminal font and finally settled on Inconsolata Medium [google.com], which I find very easy on my eyes.

  • I've gone old school: Luxi Mono.

    Nice monospace font with nice looking serifs.

    FUCK the boring sans serifs fonts.

  • ... who uses Comic Sans in the terminal?

  • My two favorite fonts for code are Source Code Pro from the Source family, and Plex Mono from the IBM Plex family.

    https://www.ibm.com/plex/

    https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Source+Code+Pro

  • I love FiraCode [github.com] with it's ligatures for programming. They're really well done and support a bunch of common idioms. I even use it on the terminal.

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