JetBrains — the company behind popular IDEs such as PyCharm — just published their open, free-to-use font family for developers. It’s called JetBrains Mono.
The font boasts clear, sharp, and unequivocal font designs. The text looks sharp on my MacBook Pro’s Retina display, on the 4K monitor it connects to, and it is more enjoyable than Menlo and Monaco.
On my company’s crappy 1080p monitor over Windows Remote Desktop, this font family is a huge step up. Consolas was fine for me until this. And for the time I had to work from home, I was working in a Remote Desktop within Citrix’s own Remote Desktop on my home Windows PC.1 It’s crisp and clean cut during that worst time imaginable. The implied vertical flow from the font makes vertical skimming ten times more enjoyable.
I am still getting used to the ligatures, especially for <=, != and <>. I wish I could still see what I actually typed, instead of seeing something like ≠ or ≤. For many other ligature designs they nailed it just right. Finally, someone bothered to adjust the kernings.
I can’t recommend it more. If you deal with code day in and day out, especially when you’re jumping between 5 languages daily, you should check it out.
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It was a very uncommon snowstorm in the only city in Canada that doesn’t know how to deal with ice and snow. As my work buddy Michael put it, with much wit, “Making nests in this weather, eh?” ↩