Tomek Poniatowicz for GraphQL Editor

Posted on Jan 21, 2020 • Updated on Jan 28, 2020 • Originally published at blog.graphqleditor.com

JetBrains Mono - font for developers by developers

#webdev #showdev #beginners #productivity

JetBrains is a company well-know for all developers. They have an impressive portfolio of dev tools among which the most popular ones are definitely IntelliJ (Java IDE) & Kotlin programming language.

JetBrains doesn't slow down in 2020 and they have just published their new product which is ... a font!
But not any font, its a font created by developers for developers and I must say ... IT'S AWESOME!

Source: jetbrains.com

Increased readability

Why this font is so special? It's simple.

JetBrains Mono’s typeface forms are free from unnecessary details which makes them easier to process for our brains. A number of specific typographic procedures have been performed to increase the readability such as:

increasing the height of lowercase letters,
easier distinguishing similar characters ( e.g. 1, l, I or semicolon with a colon).

Besides a couple of readability improvements the font also provides:

138 code-specific ligatures
support 143 language
is available in 4 weights with matching italics
is FREE & OPEN SOURCE!

Take a look!

If you love the concept of JetBrains Mono I have great news!
It's available under the Apache 2.0 license and can be downloaded from the JetBrains website.

Speed up your GraphQL API development

GraphQL Editor is a supportive tool for both advanced GraphQL users as well as those taking their first steps with GraphQL APIs. Our all-in-one development environment for GraphQL will help you build, manage & deploy your GraphQL API much faster thanks to dozens of built-in micro features.

Top comments (15)

Bud • Jan 21 '20 • Edited

Neat, have you had a chance to compare this Fira Code?

Update/Edit

So I've been running this font for the better part of day. Transitioning from Fira Code was pretty seamless, all the ligatures I use daily are available. I like the simplified characters compared to Fira, in my opinion it makes scanning JSX/TSX slightly easier, this might also be due to the adjusted character spacing. Overall I think it's a good competitor to Fira Code. There's no clear winner here, both are nice to use, it'll come down to personal preference in the end.

Current VSCode Font Settings

"terminal.integrated.fontFamily": "JetBrains Mono",
"terminal.integrated.fontSize": 12,
"editor.fontSize": 13,
"editor.fontFamily": "JetBrains Mono",
"editor.fontLigatures": true,

Arnas • Jan 21 '20

Check their web site jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ they have few comparisons with Fira Coda.

Zigmas Slušnys • Jan 22 '20 • Edited

Hello fellow Lithuanian!😃 Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.

Tomek Buszewski • Jan 22 '20

This is a great font, first one with decent ligatures that I can use without thinking "wtf is this" every ten second when I see one.

It's funny how far we've got from using Fixedsys, Courier and Courier New.

Michel Renaud • Jan 21 '20

I installed it last week. Looks very good. The ligatures were a bit of a surprise. :)

A couple of my coworkers are also trying it out.

Vaibhav Khulbe • Jan 21 '20

Definitely worth a try! I'm currently in love with Dank Mono and Fira Code.

Mattias Cibien • Jan 21 '20

Did not try Jerbrains Mono at the moment. I guess I'll give it a go and compare it to my Cascadia Code which at the moment is my font for both IDEs and terminal