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.

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.

Do you think Atkinson Hyperlegible specifically hurts readability?

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

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?

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.

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/

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

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 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).

Maybe this is a silly idea, but what about a terminal emulator that could switch fonts on the fly?

For example, it could switch to a monospace font when a "fullscreen" program like vim switches to the other buffer.

Or maybe it could even render different fonts per line.

Some people use proportional fonts in their IDEs, and have been for decades. It's just not exactly a mainstream practice. (I seem to recall that Microsoft used proportional fonts in their IDEs in the 90's. Or maybe I'm thinking of Visual Basic? Not sure.)

The main reason I have felt no inclination to use proportional fonts when coding is that proportional fonts tend to be _very_ bad at distinguishing homoglyphs and that is the _last_ thing you want when trying to find the syntax error or undefined variable. Although I will admit that I haven't look very hard for a proportional font that's actually meant for programming.

The other reason is that sometimes I read code where someone has created an ASCII diagram in the comments, or have other structures or whitespace where vertical alignment matters. (This used to be highly popular in C, although it's viewed as a bad practice in "modern" times.)

I find monospace code very easy to read, so I guess at the end of the day, proportional fonts have a few disadvantages with no real upside. For me at least.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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!

> because eventually I get sick of every single one of them.

Can I ask why?

Somehow this just seems like throwing a fourth choice into the mix, rather than simplifying anything.