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Monaspace

The Monaspace type system is a monospaced type superfamily with some modern tricks up its sleeve. It consists of five variable axis typefaces. Each one has a distinct voice, but they are all metrics-compatible with one another, allowing you to mix and match them for a more expressive typographical palette.

Letters on a grid is how we see our code. Why not make those letters better?

✨ An exploration from GitHub Next. ✨ See the full story of Monaspace at monaspace.githubnext.com.

🔤 Download the latest release 🔤

Overview

Monaspace is available as a variable-axis font and a static build. You can install them both side-by-side; their family names are distinct. For example:

• Monaspace _____: the static family
• Monaspace _____ Var or VF: the variable family

The variable fonts have one file per family (Neon, Argon, etc.). Modern and convenient!

The static fonts have one file per cut, per family. The variable axes have named stops for each axis, like light or bold for weight, italic for italics, and semiwide or wide for width. The combinatorial explosion of all these properties means the complete installation of static fonts involves hundreds of font files. But for situations that don't yet support variable fonts, the static builds give you a wide variety of stops throughout the range of each axis.

Texture Healing

Monaspace pioneered the technique of "texture healing" for monospaced fonts:

Texture healing is enabled when the calt font feature setting is turned on in your editor. The location for this setting varies across applications, and not all applications support it. See the Editors section below for specific guidance.

You can read more about how it works on the Monaspace website, and learn how it is implemented in the documentation.

Coding Ligatures

[!WARNING] Ligature handling has changed significantly in Monaspace v1.1 and v1.101. If you're upgrading, see the release notes for guidance on how to alter your editor settings.

The liga font feature enables customized spacing of repeating characters, like /// or ||. It is designed to avoid activating inside longer sequences like ////.

There are eight groups of coding ligatures, separated into stylistic sets. You may be able to enable or disable individual sets selectively:

• ss01: ligatures related to the equals glyph like != and ===.
• ss02: ligatures for greater/less or equal (<=, >=).
• ss03: ligatures related to arrows like -> and ~>.
• ss04: ligatures related to markup, like </ and />.
• ss05: ligatures related to the F# programming language, like |>.
• ss06: ligatures related to repeated uses of #, +, and &.
• ss07: ligatures related to colons like :: or =:=.
• ss08: ligatures related to combinations of periods with other glyphs like ..= or .-.
• ss09: ligatures related to combinations of the greater/less than and equals signs, like <=>,>>, and =<<.

👉 You can see an interactive display of all the ligatures on the Monaspace website

Character Variants

Specific characters have variants that you can optionally enable:

• cv30: Enable the older asterisk as shipped in Monaspace 1.0, which was vertically aligned closer to the top of the space.
• cv60: forces the <= pair to render in a fashion that matches => instead of swapping for ≤.
• cv61: enables the optional closed square ligature for []. This can be distracting when authoring arrays in many editors, because they automatically insert the closing bracket, which immediately produces the closed square ligature upon typing the open bracket.

Desktop Installation

Upgrading

Font caching on operating systems is an inscrutable mess dating back thirty years, and not something we can fix in Monaspace. Generally speaking, you should:

• First delete the old fonts…
• Then install the new fonts…
• Then restart applications that use the fonts…
• … and maybe restart your entire computer.

Restarting is usually the only way to be 100% sure that the underlying machinery in the operating system picks up the new fonts.

MacOS

You can manually drag the fonts from the fonts/otf or fonts/variable directory into Font Book.

There is also a script that automates the deletion of all Monaspace fonts from ~/Library/Fonts and then copies over the latest versions. Invoke it from the root of the repo like:

$ bash util/install_macos.sh

You can also use homebrew as an alternative:

brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts
brew install font-monaspace

Windows

You can manually drag the fonts from the fonts/otf or fonts/variable directory into C:\Windows\Fonts. Alternatively, right-click the fonts you want and click Install.

Linux

You can manually drag the fonts from the fonts/otf and fonts/variable directory into ~/.local/share/fonts.

There is also a script which automates the deletion of all Monaspace fonts from ~/.local/share/fonts and then copies over the latest versions. Invoke it from the root of the repo like:

$ bash util/install_linux.sh

Webfonts

All files with a .woff or .woff2 suffix are intended for use on the web. You do not install them with your operating system but add them to your web development project.

As with the desktop fonts, they are available in variable and static versions.

Editors

Visual Studio Code

[!WARNING] Ligature handling has changed significantly in Monaspace v1.1. If you're upgrading from Monaspace v1.0, see the release notes (v1.100, v1.101) for guidance on how to alter your editor settings.

Set the font family:

    "editor.fontFamily": "'Monaspace Neon', monospace",

[!NOTE] Variable fonts are not yet well-supported in VS Code, and it is not yet possible to mix multiple fonts. Stay tuned, we're talking with the VS Code team about it!

You must use the editor.fontLigatures setting to enable the various features (texture healing, ligatures, and character variants). The setting is a comma-separated list of font features to be enabled.

[!NOTE] This setting is unavailable from the graphical settings editor; you must create it manually.

• calt: enables texture healing
• liga: enables dynamic spacing for certain repeating character patterns like ///
• ss01, ss02, etc: enables the specific stylistic set
• cv30, cv60, etc: enables the specific character variants

Putting it all together, a setting string which enables everything but the character variants would look like this:

  "editor.fontLigatures": "'calt', 'liga', 'ss01', 'ss02', 'ss03', 'ss04', 'ss05', 'ss06', 'ss07', 'ss08', 'ss09'",

Contribution

There's no formal contribution guide yet! If you're interested in contributing to the typefaces, you should read the Texture Healing guide, as it explains how to produce the necessary alternate glyphs.

Renamer utility

This convenience utility renames and moves the built fonts into their respective directories. You will need Deno installed, and invoke it thus:

$ ./util/renamer.ts --src="~/path/to/the/built/fonts"

License

SIL OFL. See LICENSE.

Support

Please file issues in this repo. Monaspace is not a supported product; do not contact GitHub support with questions, as they do not support GitHub Next explorations.

Contributors

Monaspace was made to improve all code for all developers. GitHub Next set out on this journey in 2022, and we were fortunate to find a type foundry that shares our passion for improving software in Lettermatic. The result is a marriage of form and function that opens the door to new developer experiences, and that would not have been possible without the domain expertise and skill of the Lettermatic team and the time they invested in working with GitHub Next on figuring out how typography ought to work for code.

Lettermatic

• Riley Cran
• Danelle Cheney
• Heather Cran

GitHub Next

• Cole Bemis
• Amelia Wattenberger
• Krzysztof Cieślak
• Idan Gazit

Special Thanks To

• Anna Thomas
• Marg Chronister
• Jane Solomon