i remember looking through these during a deep dive on type selection -- naturally radon, krypton, and arguably xenon come across as a bit gimmicky, argon has stiff competition in its genre as it's the rough style of most “modern” monospace faces, but neon is actually kind of spicy. this is the closest to the “mona” in “monaspace”, being similarly derived from helvetica and its ilk, and sits at just that right level of regularity that it's easy on the eyes after a long day in a way that i previously thought was only the purview of sf mono.

if argon tickles your fancy, you might also be interested in fragment mono (https://github.com/weiweihuanghuang/fragment-mono) a similar free software “helvetica mono”.

the tragedy of both argon and fragment mono, though, is that the latter comes in one width, and the former inexplicably supports obscenely wide proportions without letting you condense it down from the bog-standard 1x2ish. most condensed options out there are these pill-shaped straight-walled monstrosities that blur together (the iosevkas and pragmatas of the world), with a few notable exceptions (the old osdn releases of mplus).

i wonder what would happen if you went in and extrapolated the width scaling for monaspace backwards into super narrow range.

(2023) initial release

Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210574

Latest release 1.2 in February includes Nerd Fonts among other things. https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace/releases/tag/v1.200

I have not cared about fonts for years.

Then I made a toy font in pico8 just to see how small I could get it.

It eventually evolved into a 3x4 font[1] named crt34.

When playing with Shiki for the docs website, I found Fira Code.

Now I'm using Fira Code in all my code samples and in VS Code.

I'm surprised by how very quickly I got used to Fira Code.

In under a day I was at a point where I forgot I had it enabled.

And I really do love how it renders => and -> and !== and === etc.

[1] https://os.90s.dev/#sys/apps/fontmaker.app.js@sys/data/crt34...

Wow. These actually have style while being monospaced!

And I can actually see myself using them! That's very rare.

I'm going to try each of these out over the next 5 days.

Starting with Radon. An italic-first pretty monospace font? Yes please!

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The Radon (handwriting) lowercase l looks an awful lot like uppercase Z. It's so obvious too. I can't take a "font for code" seriously when the designers don't see glaring symbol ambiguities.