MonoLisa
font follows function
As software developers, we always strive for better tools but rarely consider font as such. Yet we spend most of our days looking at screens reading and writing code. Using a wrong font can negatively impact our productivity and lead to bugs. MonoLisa was designed by professionals to improve developers’ productivity and reduce fatigue.
or try in a playground.
Features
Designing a monospace font is much harder than a traditional, proportional one: being constrained by the same width of all glyphs can result in a boring or unreadable font.
MonoLisa features a few unique techniques that increase the legibility and make it visually pleasant to look at for longer periods of time.
Increased width
Increased character width helped us designing a typeface with more natural, open forms. The shapes are more relaxed creating less eye strain over long periods of time.
Wide
Distinction
Distinction is critical for a good coding font since it reduces ambiguity and helps avoid mistakes that can lead to software bugs.
MonoLisa has a set of glyphs that fit together but at the same time are distinct enough so you can tell them apart.
Space
Monospaced fonts tend to have unevenly distributed dark and light space when compared to regular typefaces. MonoLisa carefully compensates the issue by using unique letter shapes to maintain the balance.
Reading Flow
MonoLisa uses open forms and terminals (starting and ending points) that are pointing towards the neighboring letters to let the eye follow the line of text fluently.
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Italics
The italics of MonoLisa are not simply slanted versions of the upright font. Some clearly differently constructed glyphs make the difference.
Script Plus
If simple italics are not enough, there is a script version available.
Coding Ligatures
MonoLisa comes with over 120 specially designed coding ligatures. Ligature is a special symbol that combines two or more characters together so it looks like one token. Ligatures help reduce visual noise and balance white space by aligning special symbols appropriately.
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Symbols
MonoLisa was designed with developers in mind. It’s one of the few fonts that comes packed with symbols to use in CLIs including PowerLine.
OpenType Features
MonoLisa includes many OpenType features to enable great customization for the most demanding aesthetes.
slashed zero zero
normal asterisk ss01
script variant Plusss02
alt g 1 Plusss03
alt g 2 Plusss04
alt sharp s Plusss05
alt at Plusss06
old style numbers onum
fractions frac
superscript sups
subscript subs
Languages
MonoLisa supports over 200 languages and different alphabets including latin, cyrillic, greek, and vietnamese.
The Team
MonoLisa is designed by Marcus Sterz, a professional typeface designer and co-founder of FaceType foundry, in collaboration with software developers Andrey Okonetchnikov and Juho Vepsäläinen who contributed their vast expertise in programming.
The result of this collaboration is an award-winning coding font created by professionals for professionals.
What Developers Say
Love the aesthetics of the font and how it improves code readability. That’s why we’ve also decided to use it as the default font at snappify.io
This font is so sharp that the readability of my code increased a lot! Definitely a font I will use for a long time.
As someone with an eye condition this font makes my life way easier. And not just in coding but even in design since it doesn’t only carry regular but the whole set of weights so you can even use it in design, logos or anything a monospace font makes sense.
I love it ♥️
I’m not much of a font guy, but after using this font for just a few days it’s grown on my and I really like it. (And people wasted no time in constantly asking me what font I use). Two thumbs up 👍👍
I switched to MonoLisa after trying out several different fonts in my terminal and in my IDE. As a coding instructor and speaker (and just someone who codes a lot in her free time), readability is always the most important thing to me in a font.
As a consultant, an instructor, and a presenter, having a clean and engaging mono font is paramount, and MonoLisa delivers information perfectly to everyone without forgetting to sneak in some personality in a gentle smile.
I’ve been using MonoLisa as my editor font for the past few months. After a small adjustment period, I really grew to love it. Going back to any of my old font choices feels like a downgrade in comparison.
I’ve been using this font for months, and while the slightly wider nature of this font took a little getting used to at first, it eventually grew on me and I saw how well this font works with my daily workflow. A great, quality font and I highly recommend it!
MonoLisa is now my go to font for all places. It has become my expectation in my terminal and code to the point that seeing other fonts confuses me. From the well designed and unique characters make it simple to parse and read throughout the day.
or check out playground and specimen.