Technology

People actually change fonts in their IDE? I've always used whatever the default is and never even thought about it.

Calling it now, Radon will become the new Comic Sans.

That was interesting how they adjusted sizes based on adjacent letters. Good idea

Too bad I'm married to JetBrains Mono.

sorry i already have comic shanns for that

https://github.com/jesusmgg/comic-shanns-mono

I like Hack as my font of choice, but I will probably give this a shot. It's a font, there is no risk of data collection, Microsoft style bugs, or other Microsoft-associated product issues.

Looks lovely! The art of fonts is something I will never understand but always appreciate. This website is also brilliant in showing everything dynamically and explaining why it all matters. Safe to say Github will start using it everywhere? It's also open source, which is nice (and makes sense considering what Github is striving for).

Edit: Not 100% sure on texture healing though. Toggling it on and off in the example makes me feel like texture healing makes everything look weirder. It makes the font look less monospace which should be good, but it just messes with my mind when some letters look slightly different in different contexts. Like the spacing is not immediately obvious to me and having the same letters look different is throwing my mind in a loop. I guess I'll need to try it to see if it's comfortable.

Very interesting technique to get the widths of the glyphs uniform without them looking ugly in most cases. OK, one can make it look bad if you know the "pain points" of the system, but in normal flowing texts, the fonts do look good.

Having different font styles depending on the context is a really nice feature. I'll definitely give it a try.

That Krypton font do looking nice

I didn't think I had strong opinions on fonts.

Turns out I viscerally despise "handwriting" fonts. They're harder to read. It just makes me recoil.

I also intensely dislike "ligatures " that turn like == into a separate glyph. Or the one that turns >= into the > with the line under it. No. Stop. That's not what I typed. That's not what I'm looking for when I scan the text.

Side note: I assume someone is feeling clever and is thinking of replying with a handwriting font message with ligatures. You don't have to. I already imagined it.

The texture healing seems cool though, but I didn't immediately notice or understand until I read through the detailed section on it.

Really confusing name for new users, considering we have monotype fonts... Guess we should be happy they didn't name it monatype...

Will they replace Consolas in Windows with this one or is it a GitHub-only-thing? In Consolas the characters 1 and l look very similar, making the font unsuitable for coding and terminal use, so it would be good if they replaced it with something else.

I'm a simple man, I just use DejaVu Sans Mono without any ligatures or other fancy stuff.

Works everywhere.

This "texture healing" seems to be based on commit mono's smart kerning https://commitmono.com/ although it only shifts letters around, it doesn't change the characters.

At least 1Il & 0O are different and (mostly) easily distinguishable in all the variants. Only exception is in the Argon variant 1 and l are too similar IMO.

I want to make a joke about how terrible the name is with just throwing in an 'a', but I don't think it would be right since I'm using Fira Code.

So I agree with OP on the style of the press release being infuriating.

It seems like a lot of tech releases these days are written for non technical journalists (ie The Verge), "tech influencers", and cargo cultists. They always read in a way that's super overhyped to the point where you almost want to be dismissive of the end product as a form of protests.

However the tech seems cool. Between VSCode and GitHub we'll be seeing a lot of feedback sooner or later.

I use Comic Mono and love it. Code is 100% easier on the eyes and to read.

The texture healing technique is technically brilliant, but imho looks weird.

I will stick to Source Code Pro.

I mean, they look nice, but I don't dislike whatever the default font that I use is, and I'm definitely not going to go out of my way to change a font. As long as it's legible, I don't really give two shits what the font is.

cool. i will still use fira code, but it may be a nicer default alternative to courier new

Cascading Code failed to impress me, although I'll give this one a try, I doubt it's better than Consolas.

Love Neon. Very easy to read.

Seems neat, I do love Sauce Code Pro though.

This is brilliant. Definitely going to try this tomorrow.