Programming and terminal fonts

Published: July 8th 2026 (week 28 of 2026) in programming

I am a big fan of the Mononoki font. There are others too, but I do not like them as much. I usually spend hours a day sitting in front of several terminal windows, looking at source code, documentation, program output, etc. Therefore, a good programming and terminal-oriented font is important to me.

Mononki

Mononoki is my time-tested default. It looks good and remains readable at small size, and it is precisely that latter quality that makes it incredibly space efficient. I can pack plenty of text on a single screen with Mononoki.

MonoLisa

MonoLisa supposedly "improves code legibility". Granted, it looks great, but there is one big problem with it.

The problem is simple: MonoLisa gives me much less vertical space than Mononoki. Despite being advertised as a "wide" font, it renders as many columns as eg, Iosevka (which is a "narrow" font), but it renders way fewer rows than Mononoki. This disqualifies it for me, because I like having a good overview of whatever I am looking at, and I frequently have quite a few buffers open at the same time in Neovim or splits in tmux.

Losing function to form is just not the deal I am willing to take.

However, if I ever decide I would like to get more relaxed with regard to the amount of text I try to fit on my monitor, MonoLisa would be a solid choice.

Iosevka

I have tried Iosevka, but did not really like it. It looks nice at bigger sizes, less so at smaller ones (maybe it will be a good font for typesetting PDFs in Typst, if not for direct use in the terminal?). It is advertised as "narrow", but in practice I got the same number of columns out of it as I get with Mononoki.

PragmataPro

To quote its marketing materials, PragmataPro is "a condensed monospaced font optimised for screen". Maybe it is, but something looks off about it to me. I can't exactly put my finger on what if wrong, but "something's wrong, I can feel it". Or maybe it is just an acquired taste and after I forced myself to use it for a few months I would start swearing by it?

Victor Mono

I tried Victor Mono and did not like it at all. This is just a reminder to myself, so I can save some time when I go looking for a possible replacement for Mononki again.

Input

I have not actually tried Input, but it looks like it would give me the same impression as PragmataPro ie, that something is off.