A font for reading code
More and more of the code on my screen, I didn’t type. It arrives. An agent writes it in a terminal while I watch, and my job is to read it, at 12 pixels, for hours.
I tried a lot of monospace fonts for that job. Some came close. None felt made for it. So I drew one.
Obel Mono is out today. It has 1,618 characters, nine weights and a true italic, and it’s free for anything you make.
Drawn at the size you read it
Type is usually drawn large and scaled down. I started at 12 px on a Retina screen, the size code really sits at, and judged every letter there first.
There’s nowhere to hide at that size. The straight strokes line up with the pixel grid so they stay sharp, the counters stay open, and the characters that get mixed up in code stay apart: 0 O and 1 l I.
One cell, always
Every character is exactly the same width, at every weight. So bold never shoves a line sideways, columns stay columns, and the lines of a box meet.
The marks agents draw
A terminal isn’t only letters anymore. Agents draw dots, spinners, trees, progress bars and boxes. When a font doesn’t have one of those marks, your system borrows it from another font, in another weight and another size, and you can see the seam.
Obel Mono draws them itself, on the same grid as the letters.
✢ Working...
It can keep a secret
Paste an API key while you’re sharing your screen, and everyone on the call has it. Obel Mono can draw keys as dots, in the font itself, with no plugin. Try it here:
A font that does this felt worth explaining, so I wrote it up: A typeface that keeps a secret.
Free, with no catch
Every typeface I draw is free. That’s the premise of Typographic Systems. Use Obel Mono at work, ship it in something you sell, change it, pass it on. The one thing you can’t do is sell the font by itself. The license, in plain words.
Get it
On macOS and Linux, this one line installs it, checking each file first:
curl -fsSL https://typographic.systems/install.sh | shThe zip holds two versions. Obel Mono has masking as a switch, for apps with font settings. Obel Mono Masked has it always on, for apps without them. The download page tells you which one your app needs.
Obel Sans is next. I’ll share all of it as I go, on at @codycollier.