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Nordwand Mono – A monospace font for coders and adventurers

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554 points by noriax86 · 169 comments

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47 threads
tywr

Wow, I didn't really expect to see my project there this morning! I'm normally a simple lurker, but I wanted to say thanks for the kind words about the project.

I know some people might want to modify or tweak the project to their liking. The project is meant to provide a Python sandbox more than just font files, so feel free to fork it or submit a PR if you feel like some glyphs need tweaking! You don't need any external tools to draw/visualize the glyphs.

  • bayindirh

    The font looks great and has its own character, kudos!

    However, it doesn't support all the characters I need, so I can't use it as a terminal font. However, I starred your repo, and will watch it.

    Thanks again for the effort, it looks really nice.

    • GreenWatermelon

      If you're talking about powerline/nerd symbols, have you tried patching it yourself? I did and it worked.

      • bayindirh

        Unfortunately no, ligatures/nerd fonts/powerline is not in my concerns list. It doesn't support all the characters all my alphabet. This is the showstopper.

        Normally, I use Berkeley, but I have a couple of terminal profiles with different fonts which I use if I open 5+ terminals sometimes, to group things. I wondered whether I can use this one of the alternate fonts when things get complicated and crowded.

        • emsixteen

          Just for clarity, the characters I need are æ/ø/å, and this is only missing the å. A little funny, given the font's called Nordwand :D

          Looks really nice though. :)

  • tgv

    It looks nice. The rounded square, boxy shape has a 70s feel to it. The 'm' bugs me a bit, and the <>, but I'm going to use it in my IDE for a while.

    Edit: I'm quite fond of the 'k'.

  • rofrol
  • throwaway2046

    Seeing as your font is OFL, you might like to submit it to Google Fonts. That would make it so much easier for devs to include on their webpages and other media.

    • herrherrmann

      Google Fonts is no longer best practice due to worse performance and privacy (and the questionable ethics of giving stuff to Google for free) compared to self-hosted fonts. So, OP should take this suggestion with a grain of salt.

      • tgv

        It is a great place to find fonts. I download them and serve them from our own platform, to avoid precisely the privacy issues.

      • echoangle

        You don’t need to use google fonts as a CDN, but I think a lot of people use google fonts to look for fonts they then download and self-host.

  • agilek

    Hey, how did you designed the typeface using Python? Asking ad a designer who thought Python is a programming language…

    • tywr

      When you design a glyph inside any vector graphics software, you are essentially asking a library to execute some commands (eg. place a point there, then place the bézier curve handles there and go to next point etc.). Instead of relying on a software with a UI, I directly called the underlying commands from python for every glyph.

      • agilek

        Thanks - got this part but did you actually design all letters one by one, or did you just feed it with all the fonts you mentioned as inspiration and YOLO? Can’t imagine how to give feedback to the curves when they live in the code and are not visualised…

        • brookst

          If the designed used an LLM, it’s easy to say “no, make the dot on the i slightly elliptical, and round the bottom left corner of the B a tiny bit more”, etc.

          I’m doing lots of CAD work this way, where previously I’d be drawing in rhino but not operating from durable product briefs.

        • tywr

          With this project I have an easy way to visualize individual glyphs on which I'm working. My workflow was to simply edit the glyph code itself, tweaking the formulas or functions and instantly plot it to see how it would look like.

  • katspaugh

    What a beautiful font! Thanks so much for open-sourcing it!

  • giancarlostoro

    I mean, I opened up the github, and wow, I don't know what it is, but visually, just seeing the GitHub, I can't remember the last time I opened up a font from HN (and they get posted often enough) that really surprised me how nice it looked. There's something really nice about it.

  • phplovesong

    Im going to give this a go. Im using berkeley mono, so this is up my alley. What colorscheme are you using in the examples? I tend to find that font + colorscheme goes hand in hand.

rootlocus

It's 99% JetBrains Mono from my quick comparison. I can barely see the difference except for $&# and a few others.

LE: Ok, so it's a little more different that JetBrains Mono as this comparison shows https://claude.ai/artifact/HPiALZ7AZ2f5FxSZtcTdNa

  • lukeify

    Setting aside the other ways AI is upending society, I absolutely love how we can all share and build on simple artifacts and micro-apps now that can be built entirely from our brain's vision expressed in plain English.

    That's a really fun tool.

  • GreenWatermelon

    It's not just a little different. it's VERY different. it's much more boxy, and letters are closer in height, especially noticeable in uppercase next to lowercase. I would say it's less readable than Jetbrains Mono.

    Lower case 'l' even extends above upper case 'G'. it missed with my brain xD

    Overall it's really pretty but not a daily driver.

  • tasuki

    Eg the `m` is much different: it has the wonderful short middle descender, taken from Ubuntu Mono.

    Your comparison says the `m` is 28% different. It's completely different. I don't know what the 28% is supposed to represent (yes, the difference in the area taken, but that's meaningless).

    • rootlocus

      It's not completely different. Look at other fonts (e.g. comic sans) to see what "completely" means. Norwand is a little wider and the middle line is shorter. 28% seems a fairly accurate measurement. It's almost one third different for just the middle descender.

      • tasuki

        The shorter middle line gives it a completely different character. Comparing how many pixels are different is meaningless.

        I will not voluntarily look at Comic Sans, but thank you for the recommendation!

  • agilek

    It is like saying Arial is the same as Verdana. These fonts are at a glance similar but different.

  • Subdivide8452

    Love the A/B tool. Must say, I'm a bit more charmed by Nordwand, even though I always use Jetbrains.

    • hoherd

      Same here. I saw it and didn't really care for it at first, but after using the blink feature on that site, I kinda think I like it better than Jetbrains. I may have to give it a a try. That site is really cool.

  • dgellow

    Your comparison does show a good amount of differences

  • adrian_b

    I prefer the JetBrains Mono choice for "3", where JetBrains Mono uses the shape that is recommended for writing a "3" that cannot be easily morphed into another digit, like "8".

  • claiir

    yea you’re right

  • dtj1123

    "93% different"

abainbridge

I prefer bitmap fonts for coding / terminal. My monitor is 100 DPI and I like to cram as much on screen as possible. Here's a comparison of a bitmap font vs Nordwand https://gist.github.com/abainbridge/a4b2647ea91e661a7576417b...

I know I'm a bit weird, but the internet is full of weird people. It seems strange to me that nobody is interested in bitmap fonts these days.

What I really want is a hand anti-aliased bitmap font which prioritizes sharpness.

  • eddyg

    You should look at Pragmata Pro⁽¹⁾.

    Hand-hinted by Fabrizio: ”More than 9000 characters optimized from 9pt to 48pt to guarantee the best possible readability.”

    It is the ultimate “programmer’s font” and well worth the money for something you stare at every day and the next best thing to a bitmap font in today’s “Retina resolution” world.

    Accept no imitations.

    ⁽¹⁾ https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/

    • Arubis

      1000%. Paid upfront years ago, installed it everywhere I look at code, and the world’s a better place.

      You can preview working with it with Blink.app for iOS; I’m unaffiliated but satisfied. Comes with PragmataPro preinstalled.

      • agos

        +1 for another happy customer. I still wish there was a wider version with all the same bells and whistles, though!

  • bbrks

    I always felt crazy for preferring bitmap fonts. The sharpness is unparalleled even against a 4k screen.

    I really like using Cozette - it has great glyph support and a hi-dpi version

    https://github.com/the-moonwitch/Cozette

    I just wish more editors had support for true bitmap fonts! Turning off anti-aliasing on a bitmap->vector converted font is OK but not quite the same.

    • Melatonic

      Interesting. I had never heard of them or a difference. Why is a vector font worse ? Can't vectors scale up and down without loss?

    • abainbridge

      Hadn't seen Cozette before. Its lovely. Ta.

  • layer8

    I don’t prefer bitmap fonts (anymore) because I find subpixel antialiasing beneficial. But I’m with you regarding low-DPI monitors, and the lack of pixel-grid hinting in modern fonts is a pity.

    It’s similar to vector icons versus hand-drawn bitmap color icons.

  • JdeBP
  • frankling_

    Below phone-level PPI values, font AA still just looks blurry to me. As I like 'em large though, there are not too many bitmap options (terminus, for example, looks quite brittle at large sizes). I seem to have settled on lode 1.5 from here on a ~110 PPI display: https://github.com/B2HDPI/B2HDPI

  • ideasman42

    With you on preferring bitmap fonts.

    As I got higher DPI monitors, I found it less hassle to use outline fonts, but I still find them preferable - given the option.

  • sheeeeesh

    Which bitmap font is this?

jan_m_savage

It's a bit like the paid font Berkeley Mono which I've been using for a while now. But I think Nordwand feels softer and nicer, it embodies a message in the font (thus the fluency effect is more potent).

The message may be subjective but it strikes me as: "I, the font, contain important data [due to the sharp curvatures and uniform size of letter elements]. Not sure if others think about fonts in this way.

Berkeley Mono's message to me feels like "I'm just doing my job, don't mind me, focus on your thing".

  • bayindirh

    > Berkeley Mono's message to me feels like "I'm just doing my job, don't mind me, focus on your thing".

    It's a font inspired by older terminals and "no nonsense" hardware of that era. I put its design philosophy as "it's so good that it's invisible". Using it for years now, and it feels natural and neutral.

    With Gruvbox dark, it really feels like I'm using an old terminal. Like how I like it.

    • jan_m_savage

      A lot of things were better in that era. Keyboards for instance. All keyboards were nice, and some companies are charging a lot of money just to give us back what we once had!

      The same goes for milk, cheese, fish cans, cars, chocolate, movies, and clothes. And books.

      • bayindirh

        That's true. However, I got some nice keyboard(s) for myself, and I don't look back much now. Not all are mechanical, but most are.

        I'm happy to report that there is still good milk and cheese out there. Fish is a hit and miss. Belgians still make incredible chocolate, but cars, movies and books have gone downhill.

        However, while I'm a pen and paper guy heavily, I love my e-reader.

        P.S.: Also, trackballs are much better for many tasks than mice. I'm happy they still make them, and make them well.

        • jan_m_savage

          Well, you got a point there. Certainly some stuff has improved. Computers for instance. And games. :)

      • bitwize

        You don't understand how expensive computer equipment was back then. We're talking multiple thousands of dollars—new car money in the early 1980s—for a decent system, and that probably came with less than 1 MiB of RAM. If a keyboard cost $100 then, that would be like $400 or $500 today! Home computers still cost many hundreds of dollars, and their keyboards were decidedly not as good as the business machines you remember as having particularly nice keyboards. So if you pay $150 for a halfway decent keyboard in today's money, you're still coming out on top compared to back then!

        It's kind of like the situation with video games. People are hemming and hawing that video game companies are starting to charge $80-$90 per game—but back in the NES and SNES era, games could cost $60 on cartridge new, and that would translate to about $120 in today's money. For Super Mario Bros. 3. And Nintendo is asking for 3/4 that for much more game today. So we're still coming out on top, and at worst we're looking at a return to the days when you had to very carefully curate a small library of games that were essential to play, as we did in the NES and SNES days due to the costs.

    • Melatonic

      Didn't IBM actually do a lot of font research back in the day ?

shoobiedoo

Looks nice. I just fell in love with Pragmasevka, a mix of Pragmata Pro and Iosevka. It's pretty much a free Pragmata Pro

https://github.com/shytikov/pragmasevka

  • DiabloD3

    Problem with that font is they haven't pushed a new build of it in over a year. You can take their build file and build it with a newer Iosevka, but you'd have to learn how that tool works (I've done it, its not user friendly).

    Might you rather be interested in https://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono ?

  • durdn

    Dude, word! I've been in love with Pragmasevka the moment a friend recommended it. Only thing to adjust is the `cell width` of your terminal.

abcd_f

> I'm very passionate about the font I am using for my terminal and overall neovim experience

And who isn't?

Squints - m is too weird - tab closed :)

JoshTriplett

I like that this isn't trying to be aggressively narrow like so many other fonts do. I currently use DejaVu Mono because it feels comfortably spaced.

  • nvarsj

    I love narrow fonts with coding, but it's all preference in the end. Obligatory "PragmataPro is the best" plug.

  • ainch

    I use MonoLisa for the same reason

voidUpdate

I get why its for coders, but what makes it "for adventurers"?

delta_p_delta_x

The overall shape of the glyphs (excluding lowercase 'l', that is, 'ell', not 'eye') is that of Berkeley Mono.[1]

[1]: https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono

  • JdeBP

    I don't know about that. In some places ('m', '0') it is closer to Ubuntu Mono.

  • Geezus_42

    I will never understand paying $50 for a font.

    • delta_p_delta_x

      > I will never understand paying $50 for a font.

      I will never understand people who expect fonts for free. They don't grow on trees. Font development is extremely involved, and I am happy to die on this particular elitist hill: the overwhelming majority of free fonts are absolutely rubbish, including the Liberation family, which is available by default on most Linux distros.

      Any font that is free and is still reasonably good is almost certainly designed by a type foundry for a megacorp's branding and user interface (so, things like SF Pro, Segoe UI, Open/Noto Sans, Roboto, JetBrains Mono, IBM Plex, Source Sans, Fira Sans, Inter, etc), or are historic properties of the type foundries themselves, like Garamond, Helvetica, Didot, Minion, etc.

      ASCII isn't the only set of characters. Just the LGK (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic) set of glyphs alone including combining marks, diacritics, contextual alternates and ligatures alone amount to several thousand glyphs, each of which has to be individually tuned for different weights, hinted for different display resolutions, hinted for RGB/BGR subpixel rendering, and more.

      • Geezus_42

        I've never had an issue with just using the system fonts. If I were a company building a product and wanted a specific font for branding, then I would pay for it. In my day to day life, extra fonts are just fluff.

    • toyg

      I think it's an investment in ergonomics, like a good chair or a good table. If your job involves staring at text 8 hours a day, $50 for a good font that relaxes your eyes and your brain is pennies well-spent.

      This goes double for any contractor who can just write it down as business expense.

    • oblio

      I think it's called "disposable income" :-)

kqr

I have been going back and forth between Luxi Mono (serif monospace fonts are rare but look great on high-resolution monitors) and Hack (like Helvetica, it has virtually no personality and thus fits well everywhere). Everything else I've seen has looked... weird or off somehow. But this is one of the first alternatives I'm entertaining the idea of trying.

My main concern is that the tall glyphs for less than < and greater than > will disambiguate badly with actual Unicode left 〈 and right angle brackets 〉.

Edit: I also realised just now the ASCII hyphen-minus - is quite long with this typeface, which makes it ambiguous with the longer dashes. (It looks freakin' great in pure ASCII environments, though!)

  • chirayuk

    The hyphen is as wide as the em dash (it's one pixel higher than the em-dash—the only visible difference to my eyes). And the $ symbol doesn't have a line that goes through all the way through. It doesn't work for me for daily use, but looks quite clean and nice overall.

hawk_3221

I don't see myself moving away from Ioskeley Mono

https://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono

trumbitta2

I used to be a coder like you, but then I took a Claude to the knee.

  • jaapz

    we still have to look at a terminal though so a nice monospace font is always welcome

    (although I'll keep using Fira)

ThePhysicist

Are people vibecoding fonts now? Just wondering as I see at least one new font pop up here every day almost...

  • mariusor

    What makes you think this is vibecoded? I can't see any indication of it in the repository.

  • oblio

    Most likely. People are throwing LLMs at everything and seeing what sticks.

    As one YouTuber said: it's the first time we can create (somewhat) coherent, context dependent and new content using something else than other humans.

    I can't say I'm too keen on wading through piles of crap, I'm also not keen on the AI bubble and its popping nor on AI's impact on employment, but if we survive all of this, we might end up with a lot of new stuff that could actually be good. 1% of this garbage will be good, but since the entire pile will be so large, that 1% might double or more our options in various fields.

moecables

I would love to use it but that lowercase M really bothers me so maybe it would be perfect for me to fork and build my own version of it

piskov

Operator Mono is still very, very nice.

https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-operator

hebetude

The real magic of this thread is I wrote a script to download all of these fonts, then open each one in my editor so I can see each one in the wild. This is a really great exercise, thanks for opening up my eyes to bitmap fonts which I didn't know about.

fercircularbuf

Nice work. I unfortunately wouldn't be able to use it for programming because I find the parenthesis and square bracket look too similar, and it would definitely increase extraneous cognitive load.

rogue_agent

Funny, I found this font last week on the programming fonts website before it blew up. Was using IoskeleyMono before, and think this is my endgame for now! Amazing readable font.

pookieinc

As someone who isn't super into fonts, this font reminds me a lot of Berkeley Mono, which is an incredible terminal font

  • alexalx666

    I was super hyped to try their other fonts after getting Berkeley Mono but it seems like "Coming soon." means maybe never

vishnuharidas

Looks good, please put up on a simple web page with a few code samples and allowing us to edit and try.

Findecanor

It gives me the vibes of output from 1970's typewriters that my dad used.

Having aging eyes, I wish monospace fonts made 8 and 0 (zero) more different from each other. I notice that I have started to confuse those two glyphs when in small sizes.

msephton

I’m not sure I’ll use this (I’m an MD IO Trial user) but I will say that finding a font you can read without thinking is one of the greatest productivity boosts as a developer.

kls0e

it's beautiful, the m is challenging tho

rbanffy

It reminds me of an old Olivetti typewriter my aunt gave me to play with.

bronlund

I love my ligatures, I will not be using a font without them.

traxler

`Only two minimal ligatures are exposed with "->" and "=>".`

I like that, I usually have ligatures turned off, because I don't like all of them, especially the ones for == or ===. (Otoh I do like != ligatures...) but I do like the arrows.

This is probably were somebody tells me how easy it is to configure singular ligatures on a font and I'll facepalm in embarrassment for never finding out.

  • antiframe

    It's pretty easy. You can opt into any ligature you like across every mode, and then add extra ones for each programming mode or other mode. For example:

      (use-package ligature
    :ensure t
    :config
    ;; Enable specific ligatures globally across all modes:
    (ligature-set-ligatures 't '("==" "===" "!=" "->" "-->" "=>" "=="))
  
    ;; Enable individual ligatures only for specific programming modes:
    (ligature-set-ligatures '(python-mode rust-mode c-mode)
                            '("||" "&&" "::" "->" "=>" "!="))

    ;; Enable ligatures only for HTML / XML:
    (ligature-set-ligatures '(html-mode nxml-mode web-mode)
                            '("<!--" "-->" "</" "/>"))

    ;; Enable global ligature mode
    (global-ligature-mode t))
  • maratc

    > I don't like all of them

    I hate all of them with a passion, because they look like a glyph (i.e. "something you can erase with a single backspace") but aren't. This confuses me first, and annoys me second. "Just because we could" doesn't mean that we should.

    Imagine having to use Backspace twice to erase e.g. Ö or Ñ, or being able to place your cursor halfway inside Æ.

  • sophrosyne42

    You can edit a font and remove the ligatures you dislike using fontforge [1].

    [1] https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge

lxe

After Iosevka came out, no other coding font has replaced it for me

  • nrvn

    Same. But we are probably just a subset of those who prefer narrow fonts. Pragmata Pro and Iosevka are top. The majority of new fonts that have popped up in recent years are all “wide”.

    • lxe

      Which I don't understand. We have wide screens. I want to stack a lot of columns on them.

Qision

I really did not expect to see Les Drus on Github let alone for a font project! Very nice

igleria

never ever tried a different font in my terminal but for some reason I feel compelled to start with this one.

swimmingbrain

Definitely going to use it in my tools and for my projects, the flexibility offered in the repo looks so great!

Altern4tiveAcc

Looks good. Suggestion: make parenthesis and brackets more different from each other.

b33l

"stiff and cold", just how I like it!

polyterative

Nice font, it reminds me the kind of fonts they are using when showing code in movies

sombragris

Looks nice, I installed it and will test it to see how it fares.

bartvk

If you want something actually more narrow, check out Anka/Coder Narrow.

plastic041

I like the shape of the lowercase italic 'w'!

Pdf preview doesn't work on GitHub.

tarcon

Spacing looks good for monospace, but it's too wide for my taste.

Gualdrapo

It reminds me of OpenBSD's Spleen fonts

gorgoiler

Brilliant project. The face looks good. The code looks good. It’s nice to see it in Python too. I don’t especially love the language but I have a great fondness for seeing life things codified with a standard API in a typed (or at least, type-able) language. Needing to draw an “A” in something without having to pull in font libraries (that is to say passing a compatible draw context to this project’s LowercaseAGlyph.draw) sounds nice.

bitwize

Y'know, I didn't think anything was gonna pull me away from Iosevka but... here we are. Gonna give this a real go. Helping its case is that it looks a bit like Berkeley Mono.

matltc

Looks like jetbrains

Johnny_Bonk

Looks awesome

villgax

I actually fricking love this font

fithisux

Is there a font manager program for Windows?

I see repeated posts on various fonts these days and I would like to try them.

Is manual installation the only option?

coolguy4

Very nice.

nelsonfigueroa

While this is nice, I'm gonna take the opportunity to plug Commit Mono because it's my favorite monospace font https://commitmono.com/.

  • dancek

    Thanks for mentioning it! First time I heard about Commit Mono. The first paragraph already had me wondering how a monospace font can read this well.

    Turns out it has smart kerning, ie. character positions are subtly adjusted to compensate for different character widths. For example, i is narrow and m is wide. That causes words like "commit" to look bad in standard monospace fonts. The m's in the middle are very densely spaced and there are wide gaps around the i.

    I'll be testing Commit Mono in my editors. Maybe it will even make me switch SilverBullet back to a monospace config.

  • warent

    Wow this is highly legible, my eyes and brain really like this. I think I’ll start using it actually.

    • achairapart

      I don't know if there is some sarcasm here. I was intrigued by the "smart kerning" feature mentioned but with both that very low contrast ratio and the small text size, I can't really see a thing on that website.

iperov

What problem does this font solve?

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