There are a lot of nice monospaced code-writing fonts that I don’t use. For some of them, there are tiny, specific nitpicks about why I don’t use them. My use case is writing code with a lot of Unicode, like in Lean or Agda, writing Markdown with a lot of Unicode because I can, and having a terminal that looks nice. For reference, I’ll be comparing a snippet of a proof state I have open at the moment, and my default font of choice is currently Fira Code.

Source Code Pro

This was my default before Fira Code! Unfortunately, it doesn’t support ligatures. I know having both ligatures (e.g. for =>) and Unicode symbols (e.g. ⇒) is recommended against for ambiguïty, but I haven’t been confused so far, and it’s nice to look at.

Julia Mono

This is the monospaced font I use for code on this website because it has excellent Unicode support. It looks very nice to me on these blog posts, but it seems a little too… round? (just look at that swanky τ!) and I prefer something more neutral for everyday code. It is, however, my next fallback font for when Fira Code is missing a character.

Iosevka

I’m very fond of Iosevka, especially with its two-column wide symbols. I use the slab variant when typesetting code in papers; the narrowness of these fonts helps save horizontal space. However, I find it too narrow for everyday writing, so for now it only features in my papers.

JetBrains Mono

The symbols here are a bit too wide and crowd the letters, in particular ⊢ and ⇒, while ⋆ is indistinguishable from a cdot. I’m not sure what’s going on with the top-open ⇑ there, while all of the bottoms of l, j, t, etc. look too flattened.

IBM Plex Mono

I use IBM Plex Sans as my default sans serif font, but I really don’t like how angular the monospaced font is, in particular the angles of j and t.

Input Mono

I can’t explain it, but something about it looks too uncanny to me. It’s like a sans serif font in disguise. The ascenders are also way too short, in particular the squishedness of the f.

Commit Mono

I recently learned about Commit Mono, which has a neat “smart kerning” feature that adjust the spacing between letters dynamically while still retaining fixed-width columns. Surprisingly, the letters shifting around is imperceptible to me and hasn’t bothered me at all. Unfortunately, I’ve had some troubles getting it right in Kitty (and I have a livetoot thread on this), so if I do use it, it’ll stay confined to VSCode until I can fix those issues.

Pragmata Pro

I can’t afford that.