Maple Mono: Open source monospace font

I reckon this is misusing some OpenType feature names.

• cv01: @$& are unrelated, this should clearly be a Stylistic Set (ss01–ss20) rather than a Character Variant (cv01–cv99). (See also cv65, another different style of ampersand.)
• cv04: I reckon this should probably also be a stylistic set, or split into two character variants. It’s also already interacting with cv35, arguably poorly.
• cv10: borderline, but I’d have done it as one SS or two CVs. CVs are about a single character, which for a modification like this is definitely expected to apply to accented versions (zżźž), but applying it to both cases (Zz) is more subjective. Per the spec, it can be reasonable. The reason for slashing Z is to avoid confusion with 2. But there’s less space to fit the slash in z (even with the slash made thinner, which it is), and it’s not easily confusable with 2 anyway. Thus I reckon it’s reasonable to want to slash Z but not z, which would call for two cvXX features.
• zero: this is supposed to be about enabling slashed zero, but is being used as “alternative zero”—replacing the slash with a dot. Should certainly be a CV.
• calt is actually covering four different things, half of which it’s inappropriate for:
  • Common coding ligatures like != → ≠: calt is completely inappropriate, this should probably be liga.
  • More drastic and exotic ligatures like the TODO badges: calt is completely inappropriate, this should be dlig or perhaps clig.
  • Enabling the italic script joining thing: this is textbook appropriate.
  • Minor tweaks like tightening >> where it seems to be a bitwise operator, adjusting 0x1 to more like 0×1, and possibly even thinning escaping backslashes (which only works with a handful of characters like \$"'./?{}[]()^*+|, super dodgy): I won’t judge one way or another, there’s an argument for calt being appropriate, but I think it’s much too coarse a tool now; clig is also arguable, especially on >>.
• The home page demonstrates one case that very obviously should have been available as a stylistic set, but is instead only available as six character variants: after “cv01” (already discussed), then comes “plain style”, which toggles cv32, cv33, cv34, cv35, cv36 and cv37. Most will want to toggle them all together. It’s begging to be a stylistic set.

(Full list/demo of the features: https://font.subf.dev/en/playground/.)

I block third-party fonts, as everyone probably should for leaking data to CDN providers, so I can’t even see this :| It seems really odd to not host it first-party on the actual site for it.

I’m a simple man: I see a monospaced font, I try it and I upvote it.

Looks nice except for the lowercase “a”, which just doesn’t fit; I can glance at paragraphs of text on the home page and all the “a”s jump out at me. Annoying.

I'd love a variant of it that doesn't have the italic looped lowercase L/l, but that does include the nicer looking italic f/i instead of the sloped variants.

The handwriting style lowercase L/l just looks wrong to me in code.

I accept it's personal preference, but it's one that'll stop me using this font.

lmao, like almost every monospace font ever, I love half of it and hate half of it.

Being able to create one's own variant is an interesting solution, not gonna lie, though from a "design good things" perspective it feels like a little of a copout.

I have never seen @ (at) written like that before (cv01). I skimmed Wikipedia and it looks a bit like the X-SAMPA ə: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign#/media/File:OCR-A_char_Commercial_At.svg.

I love Maple Mono. After switching between different fonts every couple months or so, this is the one I've been using for about three years now, I think. For me, with its rounded edges and everything, it strikes a perfect balance between being easy on the eyes and not being too playful. (At some point, fonts like Fira Code got too "sharp" for me, if that makes sense.)

Shame there is no version available to download easily without ligatures, because for some reason I hate ligatures :)

Very few monospace fonts have rounded corners

This is why I’ve been on Source Code Pro for years.

This is the first time I encounter "Nerd Fonts" and I'm not sure what it is. This website says:

Nerd Fonts patches developer targeted fonts with a high number of glyphs (icons). Specifically to add a high number of extra glyphs from popular ‘iconic fonts’ such as Font Awesome, Devicons, Octicons, and others.

So it seems to be a CLI tool to modify font files and add more glyphs. How does a font support that?

I am usually reluctant to change my font (Source Code Pro, ATM), but wow, I really liked this one the moment I've looked at it. I had to swap the "a", but otherwise I really like it.

This looks really nice! I like the roundedness. The in-browser playground doesn’t seem to have the right Chinese glyphs though? I can’t get characters to line up 1:2 Chinese to Latin.

A beautiful font! Personally I hate ligatures, but they look amazing in this one!