JetBrains Mono

JetBrains Mono.

JetBrains, the software company best known for its integrated development environments, Kotlin language and continuous integration tool TeamCity, has developed a monospace font optimized to reduce developers’ visual fatigue. Since developers spend most of their time writing and reading code, the font they use should read easily and reduce visual fatigue. The font developed by JetBrains improves on several well-known fonts like Consolas, Cascadia Code, Fira Code, Inconsolata, and others: the x-height, or the relative height of lower-case letters compared to upper-case letters, excluding the ascenders and descenders, is higher, enhancing contrast and legibility at any given size. The shape of the ovals, which are almost rectangular, and the absence of any serifs or other unnecessary details eases vertical scanning (unlike regular readers, programmers do a lot of scanning from top to bottom or bottom to top, looking for specific items). Other noteworthy details include the number of ligatures (138!) for joining symbols typical of coding. And the best part of Mono is that this font, developed by Saint-Petersburg designer Philipp Nurullin, is open source, free and universally available (Apache 2.0 license).

⇨ JetBrains, “JetBrains Mono. A typeface for developers.”