psudoFont Liga Mono is a monospaced font family with programming ligatures, based on Meslo/Menlo and IBM Plex Mono/Lilex. It's designed for coding and terminal use.
This font has two different weights: Regular/Italic (400) and Bold/Bold Italic (700).
This is a new font family, a lot of glyphs were redesigned, some resemble Menlo/Meslo, some IBM Plex Mono/Lilex, and some others are unique to psudoFont Liga Mono. The changes and adjustments vary from small details to entire characters but always keeping the core identity within the font family.
The whole journey resembled a lot what I went through when I created my color theme Nebula Oni Theme, the same theme used to render the examples below - but this project took a month instead of several months.
- Works better with font size
16or higher.
- Uninstall the previous version if you have it installed.
- Download and Unzip the file.
- Install the font:
- Windows: Select all font files in the folder, right-click and click Install from the menu.
- Mac: Select all font files in the folder and double-click them and Install.
-
Go to
File>Preferences>Settings. -
Search for
Font Family. -
Add
psudoFont Liga Monoto the list of font families. -
To enable
ligatures, search forFont Ligaturesand edit thesettings.jsonfile by adding the following line:"editor.fontLigatures": true
For a complete list of changes, see the release notes on Releases.
I was naive... I thought I wouldn't actually edit and design glyphs myself because it would be too much work, but I was wrong - I underestimated my itch... It last a month or so and here we are, a completely new version!
I previously complained that I liked Menlo/Meslo but I wanted to make it a bit thinner and that I liked IBM Plex Mono/Lilex's italic but not all of it. So I went ahead and changed all of that.
This version of psudoFont Liga Mono is much more cohesive and consistent and now I can say it's actually a Font Family instead of a Frankenstein - fused together with multiple fonts...
I wanted to use Menlo/Meslo Regular but I also wanted IBM Plex Mono/Lilex Italic... So what if I mixed and matched these two together?
And that's what I did.
Like so many other things, it started with an itch, and thus, this Frankenstein Font was born. It's aliiiiveeee!
TL;DR: It always starts with an itch, usually when something bothers me, the itch grows through time and sometimes I end up doing it myself. That's how I ended up here, somehow creating my own programming font.
I've tried several different fonts over the years but I kept using Meslo as my go-to font. For the past few years I've been using a version with ligatures and powerline: Liga Meslo LG M DZ.
I came across IBM Plex Mono and I liked its x-height to base ratio, but it wasn't quite it for me, there were some characters and symbols that I didn't quite like. On the other hand, its italic was quite different from its regular style, it looked elegant, it made me interested in testing it.
I tried using Lilex for a bit - which is based on IBM Plex Mono but with ligatures - therefore the name, Ligature Plex, Lilex, or so I think.
I think Meslo/Menlo's regular look a bit too thick, and although I really liked IBM Plex Mono/Lilex's italic, I didn't like it enough to overlook what I didn't like about it, so I ended up switching back to Meslo/Menlo.
That, until I started thinking about making my own font design...
I used Lilex as a base because it would be easier than starting from scratch or making all Meslo glyphs thinner, plus, I would have to adjust the x-height of all characters of either font.
Lilex has 1000UPM, so I scaled up all glyphs to 2048UPM, which seems to be the standard for most new fonts.
For regular I kept Meslo as a reference but there were also some symbols, marks and even small details that I preferred from Lilex - like the ending's curves and angles - so I used those as well.
Lilex's italic had a lot of sharp corners, so I redesigned them all to be more rounded and smooth. This small detail made me redesigned lots of glyphs. I also changed some characters like w, v, r, {, }, @, 5, 6, 9, etc. Actually, I had to change the numbers in both regular and italic.
Another thing that I didn't like about Liga Meslo LG M DZ were the ligatures combinations for fi, ffi, fl, ffl, etc. They get too close together, I don't like how it looks. So I'm not supporting these ligatures.
Meslo had almost double the glyphs compared to Lilex - which already had more than 1400 glyphs -, and it wouldn't be viable for me to redesign and adjust all these extra characters, so I didn't. They don't affect the overall use, it still supports all Lilex ligatures and symbols and some extras I included.
Considering that when this all started I didn't know how to edit a single glyph, all the hustle in between and 3 redesigns later, I would say I liked the final result. Although inspired by Meslo and Lilex, this turned out to be its own unique font family.
Click on the images to see a larger version with more details, the low-res image rendering is pretty bad for texts with dark backgrounds.
- TypeScript
(Nebula Oni Theme: Hourglass/Grey)
- Python
(Nebula Oni Theme: Cerberus/Glacial Blue)
-
C
(Nebula Oni Theme: Spirograph/Purple) -
Terminal
(Nebula Oni Theme)
This project is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. See the LICENSE file for details.
- Meslo LG
- Menlo
- Vera Sans Mono
- DejaVu Mono
- Lilex
- IBM Plex Mono.
The original Meslo LG is a customized version of Apple’s Menlo font, which on the other hand is based on the open-source font Bitstream Vera and the public domain DejaVu. Lilex is an extended font on top of IBM Plex Mono.
- @psudo-dev
- If you really liked it, give it a star!
- Would you consider buying me a coffee to support my work? Thank you!
