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Brutalist Mono

Brutalist Mono is a very simple modification on top of DejaVu Sans Mono (yes, another one), making it more suitable for coding. The changes are very nitpicky and you can probably just move along.

brutalist

Comparison to DejaVu Sans Mono:

brutalist

Changes from DejaVu Sans Mono

v1.0:

  • r – offset to the left
  • _ – increase height, reduce width
  • - (minus) – make wider
  • 0 – slashed instead of dotted

v1.1:

  • l – increase upper arm and recenter
  • i and j – increase dot sizes, making them square

v1.2:

  • l – drop foot below the baseline
  • C – flatter terminals
  • G – flatter top terminal
  • J – flatter bottom terminal
  • S – flatter terminals
  • a – flatter top terminal
  • c – flatter terminals
  • e – flatter bottom terminal
  • g – flatter bottom terminal
  • r – flatter top terminal
  • s – flatter terminals
  • 2 – flatter top terminal
  • 3 – flatter terminals
  • 5 – flatter bottom terminal and mid stroke
  • 6 – flatter top terminal
  • 9 – flatter bottom terminal
  • $ – flatter terminals

v2.0:

  • C – slightly rounder shape
  • G – more even upper terminal
  • S – more even terminals
  • c – more even terminals
  • l – more pedantic bottom
  • r – wider right terminal
  • s – more even terminals
  • 9 – more even lower terminal
  • g – more even lower terminal
  • J – clean up lower terminal
  • ~ – blatantly stolen from Hack
  • t – make bottom curved the same as l
  • j – make bottom curved the same as l
  • [ – make wider, match lparen's width
  • ] – make wider, match rparen's width
  • 5 – more even bottom terminal, add back the "spike" in the middle
  • y – curved bottom terminal
  • $ – more even terminals

v2.1:

  • ,, ., ;, :, !, ? – use rounded dots and commas (adapted from Hack)
  • * – use Menlo variant
  • l – clean up bottom curve a little bit

v2.1.1

  • fix: font not showing up as monospace (#2)

Motivation

Another DejaVu/Vera Mono clone? Yes. But this one is opinionated:

  1. I don't care about "readability on small font sizes". Make your font larger and/or get a decent monitor. It's the 21st century.
  2. I don't care about font hinting. Modern monitors are high-DPI.
    • Note: The native renderer on Windows seems to require manual hinting instructions to be added even when rendering at high DPI screens. I will not be adding this. Therefore, this font looks terrible on Windows, unless you're using an Electron app (VS Code, Atom, etc). They're using a custom renderer and render correctly.
  3. I don't care about O0, lI1|, or any of that crap. It's fine. See point #1.

If any of this bothers you, try Hack. It's awesome. I made my mod available as well.

Why not Hack?

Hack is great, but has way too many unnecessary modifications on top of the baseline DejaVu Sans Mono. To name a few:

  • the parentheses are unnecessarily spread out in earlier versions, and too rounded in newer ones
  • the 1 has an awkward downward facing arm
  • contributing is complicated if you're only using plain old FontForge (I don't want to shell out EUR 250 for Glyphs.app)
  • alt-hack is great but I ended up just using it to revert most mods back to the original DejaVu style, so I figured why bother?

Why not Menlo?

  • the uppercase N is hideously wide (once you see it, you can not unsee it)
  • punctuation is unnecessarily exaggerated
  • there are many weird tweaks done to it (relative to its parent Bitstream Vera Sans Mono) to make it render better on ancient Mac OS versions with low-DPI monitors, which disqualifies it immediately (see point #1 in "Motivation" above)

Why not DejaVu Sans Mono?

This typeface is almost perfect for programming†, except:

  • the underscore is ridiculously thin, making it visually odd when reading THINGS_WITH_MANY_UNDERSCORES and esoteric C/C++ identifiers with __multiple__underscores__
  • the lowercase r is offset a bit to the right (Hack has got this right – once you see it, you can not unsee it)
  • the - glyph is ridiculously narrow
  • other nitpicky stuff you really don't care about but I do

† – Source Code Pro is still the king, and I don't dare come at the king.

Building

Short version:

  • Edit the .sdf files with FontForge (if you want to mod)
  • make
  • observe the build folder

This will probably fail, so: long version.

Contributing

If you really convince me.

License

Same as DejaVu fonts, see LICENSE.