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Fonts and Colorschemes

Introduction

I've noticed that I often end up wasting a lot of time searching for fonts and colorschemes to use in my terminal and in my web browser. This page is meant to serve as a reminder about my aesthetic tastes and to prevent me from going down into rabbit holes I've already went into before. In addition to listing the fonts that I like and use regularly, I've also mentioned some popular fonts that I didn't like when I used them. The reasons why I didn't like them are usually one, or more, of the following:

they are deceptively good at face value but perform poorly in terminals and web browsers
they are bland and seem to have no personality or taste
they aren't legible enough
they don't have all the font weights I need

I guess the decision to choose fonts would sound weird and alien to people who are accustomed to "modern" UI and UX patterns on smartphones and desktop environments like GNOME. It's funny how people assume that everyone on the planet would be okay with a specific set of fonts and colors but I hope they realize that people aren't zombies (at least some of us aren't).

One of the things I've noticed ever since I started using a high resolution monitor (27 inch 4k) is that while sans-serif fonts are better than serif fonts when being used as UI fonts, they often lack personality and are quite bland. One of the best examples I can think of is the workhorse Roboto font designed by Christian Robertson and sponsored by Google for inclusion in the Android operating system. There's nothing inherently wrong with Roboto, and its variants, but it's just ... bland. If you really enjoy typography, using a low resolution display is a major disservice to yourself because you can't enjoy viewing high-quality serif fonts at their complete glory. Considering how human beings have mostly read books with serif fonts throughout most of our literary history, I believe that even when reading text on a screen, serif fonts should be utilized more than sans-serif fonts.

Fonts and Selection Criteria

It should be obvious but font choices are subjective and won't necessarily have an objective reason for not being used. Even so, I do think there are some criteria that can be used to judge a font, especially monospace fonts.

For monospace fonts, the font:

shouldn't have ambiguous characters when writing 0, O, o and 1, l, I
should have centered alignment for character combinations like ->, <-, !=, => ~
should have decent serifs for character combinations like ${}, (), []
shouldn't enforce, promote, or encourage using ligatures
should look good on HighDPI monitors
shouldn't be a bitmap font

Monospace Fonts

Berkeley Mono
Hermit

I bought Berkeley Mono back in February 2024 and I've been enjoying using it since then. This was the first font I paid for! I was apprehensive about paying for a font but decided to go ahead because I liked what I saw using the demo font.

Berkeley Mono

I'm not sure when I started liking Hermit even though I've had it installed for quite some time. The individual characters might seem relatively poorly designed in terms of legibility but the experience of using it is quite different, maybe because of the higher font-weight.

Hermit

Sans-Serif Fonts

Inter

I've always liked Apple's San Francisco font family but it's not open source or available for purchase on Linux. Inter is a perfect substitute for the San Francisco font family, and goes even beyond in terms of quality by providing several OpenType features and a variable version of the font.

Inter

Semi-Serif Fonts

Okay, this might seem like strange category but I discovered this term on Matthew Butterick's website when I was admiring the Heliotrope font. Matthew calls it a semi-serif font. The only fonts I know of which are similar to Heliotrope are Alegreya and Biolinum (also known as Libertinus, which is a fork of Biolinum).

Heliotrope

This font is designed by Matthew Butterick and it's uniquely superb, both in terms of legibility and personality. Unlike most fonts, Heliotrope also has true italics. I intend to use this as a secondary font on my HTTP website. This is the second font I paid for.

Heliotrope by Matthew Butterick

Serif Fonts

Source Serif Pro

Source Serif Pro is a decent workhorse serif font that might seem bland but I found that it's quite legible and has a straightforward approach to serif-ness of characters. Source Serif Pro should serve as a decent option for blockquotes and headings on websites and body text on printed papers.

Source Serif Pro on Font Squirrel

Color Schemes

Light Colorschemes

Chiba Light

A colorscheme that I ended up designing after becoming frustrated with the available options. It's WCAG AA compliant and tries to have colors with similar luminance in the CIELAB color space. I haven't made this colorscheme open source yet because I feel it can be improved although I'm using it as a daily driver on my terminal for several weeks now.

Dark Colorschemes

Chiba Dark

A colorscheme that I ended up designing after becoming frustrated with the available options. It's WCAG AAA compliant and tries to have colors with similar luminance in the CIELAB color space. I designed this colorscheme after the developer of the foot terminal, Daniel Eklöf, asked for designing an original dark colorscheme for foot.

Chiba Dark

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Updated: 2023-09-17

Created: 2023-08-30