I pitted this font against my trusty Consolas, but Consolas wins outright - all the features that JetBrains claim are beneficial (narrow characters and so on) actually seem to make for a less legible font.
This is now a very crowded space, and JetBrains' font seems very similar (to my eye) to [Input](https://input.fontbureau.com) - honestly, I'm not sure what JetBrains think they are bringing new to the table here :-/
But readability and legibility can be measured. It's unfortunate that Jetbrains makes a bunch of claims without supporting any of them with results surveys/studies, because if right, that would translate to other font designs as well.
I use three different fonts in terminals, editors and IDEs. So I'm sure this font will look good to someone and will find a use. At the moment I can't find a use for it. For now I'll stick with Operator Mono, Cascadia Mono and Fira Mono.
IMHO, fonts have been studied too deeply for too long for some graphic designer at J. Random Corporation to be able to easily make improvements. In situations like that, most changes and new ideas end up being regressions.
Although the plate or film is rendered at 1600/2400/3200/4800 dpi, the dot gain from the ink soaking into the paper tends to blur fine details. The printing software tried to account for the dot gain, but it was still there.
If you look at a 300dpi laser printer output vs 600dpi, most everyone can tell if they look. Higher resolutions may need a loupe to discern differences.
You'd choose different DPIs based on the paper the final print would go on, though (it took longer to print at higher DPIs: sometimes over an hour before the job got sent to the film printer). Newspaper has the worst dot gain, and got the lowest DPI. Coated stock had the best, and got higher DPI.
Do you by any chance have a link? When I looked for the same thing, I just found one GitHub issue referring to Scintilla internals.
On a Mac, Menlo looks nearly identical.
But it almost feels like trying out new fonts is busywork...
(edit: the lowercase a is also rapidly gaining my dislike, it's all smashed up and looks weird)
Outside of terminal windows and places where Monospace Regular is used automatically, I tend to use Luxi family as my font -- it used to be shipped with RHEL in the 90s, was removed due to license problems (or so I'm to believe) in one of the Fedora Core releases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxi_fonts
Is that common in fonts and I never noticed before?
And while I agree "oblique" is a more technical term, "slanted" is frequently used to mean the same thing, and is probably more understandable. Perhaps I am wrong and it isn't :)
However, in Intellij (and other Jetbrains IDEs), they've recently increased the line spacing to (I currently use 1.1)
With the increased line spacing, I have had no trouble distinguishing between lower and upper case (to my surprise).
I started a new job 1.5 months ago which facilitated a jump from IntelliJ to Visual Studio. I've been trying to find a good editor font as the Consolas that was the default for VS 2019 just didn't agree with me. I'm ok with Consolas in bash terminal but somehow inside VS it bugs me. I tried a few of my Mac favorites like Monaco and Menlo. Was using Menlo and it was a decent experience. Tried this JetBrains one and so far so good. It just works for me. I think will keep it.
> 1. Increased height for a better reading experience
A high x-height is good for coding fonts, but this x-height is now too high. To my eye, this is now at the point where lowercase letters are getting harder to distinguish from uppercase letters at a glance, so instead of increasing legibility it's actually decreasing it now. There's a good reason most other coding fonts haven't gone this high.
> 2. The shape of ovals approaches that of rectangular symbols.
Again, this is a problem because it makes letterforms harder to distinguish. It's important that the right side of a "b" look very different from an "h"... but if you make the right side of the "b" very straight, they look more similar. The whole point of letterforms is to be easy to differentiate from each other, not to make them more similar.
> 3. JetBrains Mono’s typeface forms are simple and free from unnecessary details... The easier the forms, the faster the eye perceives them and the less effort the brain needs to process them.
Again, this is just factually false, or else all books would be printed in sans-serif body text instead of serif. The main reason serif fonts are used is that all their extra "details" make reading easier, not harder -- because the eye has more clues to differentiate letters. Now because of resolutions of screens, sans-serif is still sometimes a better choice on computer screens, but this makes distinctiveness of letterforms even more important, not less.
For example, they choose a single-story instead of double-story lowercase "g", which is just harder for the eye to distinguish from a "q". Getting rid of the stem on a "u" also makes it less distinguishable, and harder to read. And so on.
I'm genuinely confused as to how the philosophy for this typeface was developed, when it seems to go directly against basic established principles of legibility.