To this day I haven't seen a monospaced font superior to Courier New.

And before anyone asks: No, this isn't a meme. Yes, I'm 300% serious.

There's a vectorized version of Monaco with pixel-perfect hinting when anti-aliasing is disabled that I've been using for years now. I don't remember where I got it from though. It's beautifully legible at any size.

I was trying to remember the Apple font I used to download for use with IDEs in Linux back in the day because it was by far the best for programming I'd ever seen. Monaco must have been the one.

I'd love to see it

Could you share the font files? I’m curious to see it.

You have to be trolling us. Literally the fish that got away story for fonts.

If you want to go fishing on this, one hole is Apple's old low-end printer line. The printer disks had expanded versions of the 'city' fonts which never shipped with the OS.

> To this day I haven't seen a monospaced font superior to Courier New.

Liberation Mono. Metrics that match Courier New, very legible at all font sizes, easy on the eyes and consistent, wide character support, free, none of that ligatures stuff (personal preference). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts

Some might also like Cousine as an alternative, a version called FiraCousine also supports ligatures for those who want them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croscore_fonts

I didn't know about the Croscore fonts, thanks. They look very similar to the Liberation fonts.

Liberation Mono is not bad. Sadly, Liberation Sans is a no-go because it lacks crossbars on the capital "i". Such an annoying failing of so many sans fonts.

> Such an annoying failing of so many sans fonts.

Here's an example of some fonts, for anyone curious: https://i.imgur.com/jYA6jt3.png

Some fonts like Arial are bad at this, capital "I" and lowercase "L" look the same. Calibri and Liberation sans both have slight differences, but not enough to not be confusing. Some fonts like Open Sans have crossbars on capital "I", which solves this problem. But that's not the only solution, fonts like PT Sans have a different looking lowercase "L" which is different enough not to cause confusion. Then again, technically you could also run into issues with the vertical line symbol "|".

Also, PT Mono is a nice font, but has issues with a small full stop symbol at smaller sizes (not as pronounced as Liberation Mono, annoying): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PT_Fonts

Thanks! I compiled a list of sans-serif fonts with acceptable capital "i" and zero/O distinction a while back... but don't have it on hand. But it's a lot faster to go to fonts.google.com, select sans-serif, and change the example text to "Does this have a proper I and O and 0" and start scrolling!

Have you tried Courier Prime, with a less anemic weight and optional O0 and Il1 differentiation? (Though it has janky hinting on Windows.)

The only issue I have is with the 'weight' of Courier New. It's too thin for me to be able to read. If it were just a hair thicker and had proper ligatures, I might use it.

That's because it was digitized wrong, from the metal rather than from the effect of the metal smacking a ribbon onto paper.

To this day, there isn't a font that I hate more than I hate Courier New.

Don't know why, it is of course not logical, but it is.

Probably not the font itself but the environment around it when you see it?

You usually sees it as the default monospace typeface in an old windows environment, probably with no anti-aliasing and with low resolution screen. That combination is an eyesore.

Courier New in an modern environment, with modern text rendering and anti-aliasing on high res screen is actually not bad at all.

I see it in other people's PuTTY sessions. It's so bad.

Use Consolas, or Droid Mono, Lucida Console, almost anything.

Courier is so thin and terrible. Combine that with the default color scheme of most Linux terminals...ugh.

Maximize that terminal window on a 16:9 display when connected to a device that only gives 80 characters wide output as the final mail in the coffin.

Too thin for me. I prefer regular old Courier.

Allow me to introduce to you, Courier Prime:

https://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/

It's slightly thicker to match what Courier from a typewriter actually looked like on a page with the ink bleed -- Courier New was modeled after the typewriter forms, not the result on the page, which to me has always been a massive error.

And Prime has beautiful, actual italics.

I really like Courier New but I like DejaVu Sans Mono (https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/) more. :)

Courier makes my eyes bleed.

> To this day I haven't seen a monospaced font superior to Courier New.

"To this day I haven't seen a monospaced font that I like more than Courier New", surely.

What is your quantitative measure for this, and what are the values of the other fonts you've tried?

The absolute worst is when a monospace font puts fi into a ligature with a width of 1 character, entirely defeating the purpose of being a monospaced font.

I have never seen that happen. Wouldn't use.

Can you provide an example of the _font_ doing this? Substitution of individual characters with ligatures is in my experience a feature of the typesetting/display engine (which decides how to represent the "bytes" as glyphs), not the font itself. Indeed, this ligature substation is often something you can toggle in whatever application you're using if it's capable of doing the substitution at all.

OpenType fonts can define ligation pairs. If the editor implements OpenType ligatures, it will read the instructions from the font and implement them. There will probably be a setting to enable or disable ligatures entirely, and there may be another one for which ligatures to include.

> If the editor implements OpenType ligatures, it will read the instructions from the font and implement them.

Exactly.

I don't use ligatures at all, but I have seen it on websites. So perhaps it's the CSS of the website that has decided to do this. I don't have any specific examples off hand, but my mental picture puts it on sites that also use this style of font: https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/ (although typing fi into the sandbox on the site doesn't exhibit the behavior).

Yup. It's the browser that's choosing to display this. As 'gdwatson pointed out, the font can indicate which ligatures are available, but whether or not the substation occurs also depends on the typesetting engine.

So then it is the responsibility of the font to make sure that when a ligature that it made available is used that is displayed as two characters wide instead of one?

If that's the shape the font designer wants for the ligature glyph, yes. IIRC, Tonsky's Fira code is designed with this in mind (https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode) (and Butterick specifically points this out)

But maybe it's the intent of the designer to have each glyph have the same width, not each "character", so the glyph LESS-THAN OR EQUAL TO (≤, https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2264) would be the same width as < or =: it's ultimately up to the application/typesetting engine to decide whether or to substitute the character string "<=" as "≤", and to see if the font _has_ that character and how to render it to the screen.

I suppose you could have the typesetting engine choose to somehow read the two characters, note that there's a ligature substitution, and "fit" the ligature glyph into a two-character space (say, padding the glyph or horizontally stretching it), but I doubt that would be very pleasing.

But ultimately what gets displayed is up to the typesetting engine: it can choose to use or not use ligatures; it can choose the spacing between glyphs; whether to "fake" certain styles (such as italics), text justification — all sorts of behavior. Good typesetting is available in many more applications today than it was, say, 25 years ago. There was all kinds of janky behavior going on, both from the engines not using information in the fonts when it was available, and faking it or overriding it as well.

And your example about CSS and browsers is exactly this. There can be information added to indicate how things should be displayed, but it’s ultimately up to the renderer. All the tricks used to adapt to various ways browsers render the same data, and sometimes the same (font and CSS) data in different contexts (say, as part of a <p> vs part of an <input>) in the same browser.

Found an example: <https://api.slack.com/events/url_verification#markdown>

It appears to be because of `font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures` being set on body.

Bitbucket used Nimbus Mono with this unfortunate behavior, until I disabled it with a Stylus CSS injection.

Overpass Mono does it:

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Overpass+Mono?preview.text...

It's been fixed in Red Hat Mono.

That looks so wrong. Why would they do this?

I suspect is just a bug: the ligature tables were copied from the regular variant, and perhaps no one noticed for some reason. Maybe the assumption was that the renderer would turn of ligature processing in monospace mode at the time, and the reference renderer did that?

I can't find any examples now, but I'm positive that there have been "coding" fonts which do this that have hit the front page of HN. Highlighted as a feature in the screenshots, even.

Another example of form over function, to the utter detriment of function, IMHO.

Perhaps Fira Code?

https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10764527

But I think it's different: it uses double-width characters for two-character ligatures, so this doesn't break alignment.

It's truly amazing that people can like different things, no?

3 years later: oops it had an unintentional backdoor, we didn't know about that. lol.

Thank deity that we don't have package managers for fonts.

Let me present you: https://github.com/alexmyczko/fnt

we’ve had them for a very long time, actually

https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Font/DA_Mover

> Thank deity that we don't have package managers for fonts.

I use the Homebrew package manager on macOS to install fonts. Probably works the same way when running Homebrew on Linux.

How I install one of my favorite fonts:

    brew install font-meslo-lg-nerd-font

I'd love one, honestly. Fonts do get updates, especially fonts patched with the Nerd Fonts extensions... would love to be able to update mine in one go.

> I want to see => not some ligature. But again that's subjective and there's room for all at the table.

The way you put this is funny, because your => renders as a ligature for anyone with a ligature font as their default font in their browser (me).