6 great monospaced fonts for code and terminal in Fedora

This article has been checked and updated in January 2020 for correctness.

Because they spend most of their days looking at them, most sysadmins and developers are pretty choosy when it comes to picking a monospaced font for use in terminal emulators or text editors. Here are six great monospace fonts that can be easily installed from the official Fedora repositories to make your text editor or terminal emulator look and function just that little bit nicer.

Inconsolata

A favourite of many programmers, Inconsolata is a clear and highly readable humanist monospaced font designed by Raph Levien. It features a slashed zero to distinguish that glyph from the uppercase O, and also has easily distinguishable different glyphs for the lowercase L and the numeral 1.

Inconsolata_sample

To install Inconsolata, search for it in the Software application in Fedora Workstation, or install the levien-inconsolata-fonts package using DNF or yum on the command line.

$ sudo dnf install levien-inconsolata-fonts

Source Code Pro

Source Code Pro is a monospaced typeface released under the SIL Open Font License by Adobe. It features a dotted zero to distinguish that glyph from the uppercase O, and also has different glyphs for the lowercase L and the numeral 1.

sourcecodepro_sample

To install Source Code Pro, search for it in the Software application in Fedora Workstation, or install the adobe-source-code-pro-fonts package using DNF or yum on the command line.

$ sudo dnf install adobe-source-code-pro-fonts

Fira Mono

Fira Mono is the monospaced variant of the Firefox brand font Fira Sans. It has a little more weight than some of the other fonts in our list. It also features a dotted zero, and different glyphs for the lowercase L and the numeral 1.

firamono_sample

To install Fira Mono, search for it in the Software application in Fedora Workstation, or install the mozilla-fira-mono-fonts package using DNF or yum on the command line.

$ sudo dnf install mozilla-fira-mono-fonts

Droid Sans Mono

Droid Sans Mono is part of the Droid Family of fonts commisioned by Google for earlier versions of Android. One downside to this font is the lack of a dotted or slashed zero, making the zero glyph hard to distinguish from the uppercase O. There is also versions of Droid Sans Mono available on a 3rd party website that add a dotted or slashed zero to this font, but these arent available in the Fedora repos, so you will need to download and install the font manually.

To install Droid Sans Mono, search for it in the Software application in Fedora Workstation, or install the google-droid-sans-mono-fonts package using DNF or yum on the command line.

$ sudo dnf install google-droid-sans-mono-fonts

DejaVu Sans Mono

To install DejaVu Sans Mono, search for it in the Software application in Fedora Workstation, or install the dejavu-sans-mono-fonts package using DNF or yum on the command line.

$ sudo dnf install dejavu-sans-mono-fonts

Hack

Hack bills itself as having “No frills. No gimmicks. Hack is hand groomed and optically balanced to be a workhorse face for code.” Hack builds on the monospaced versions in the Bitstream Vera and DejaVu font families, modifying and enhancing glyph coverage, shapes and spacing. Hack works best in the 8px to 12px range on regular DPI monitors, and as low as 6px on higher DPI monitors.

hack

Hack is not in the official Fedora repos yet, but is being worked on. You can install the font files directly from the Hack github.


This post was originally published in October 2015. It was updated in in October 2016 to add Hack.
Fedora Project community

38 Comments

  1. Krystian

    Inconsolata – thanks 🙂

  2. Malikith

    Indeed, Inconsolata is a very nice font. It’s easy on the eyes and easy to read. Thank you for posting this.

  3. Liberation Mono!

  4. Keeping an eye on this – because I can use a clean font for working in Focuswriter.

    • ooh, thanks for the tip! i should do another post about focus writer — it’s a pretty neat piece of software. 🙂

  5. If the zero isn’t marked I don’t use the – which rules out Droid Sans Mono for programming and the console. I’ve got dyslexia and I need all the hints I can get.

    I’ve used the others you list and at the moment Source Code Pro is my favourite.

    I’ve also used Anonymous and Anonymous Pro – both are open and both have marked zeros.

  6. Isn’t DejaVu Sans Mono the default monospaced font on Fedora, already?

    $ fc-match mono
    DejaVuSansMono.ttf: "DejaVu Sans Mono" "Book"
  7. Maxim Egorushkin

    Source Code Pro would be the best if it did not have too much leading, i.e. the lines are too sparse.

    Liberation Mono is very similar to DejaVu Sans Mono, but with less leading. Hence Liberation Mono is one the best, in my opinion.

  8. Syskoll

    The Fira designers are very nice and incredibly responsive. I had found a minor issue with a glyph in their font and emailed them, they responded very quickly and scheduled a fix. Fira Mono is growing on me. It’s readable yet compact.

    • Yeah, i knew about Fira Sans, but didn’t know about the Monospaced member of the family until I started researching this article. It is now what i use for gedit and Terminal. It also looks fantastic on my HiDPI laptop. 🙂

  9. Thanks for posting this, very useful. I downloaded and installed Inconsolata, and its really good. 🙂

  10. Rabin

    Currently I use Source Code Pro, But there is also Anka/Code which looks good.

  11. condor

    I picked Droid Sans Mono for a test drive.

  12. Droid Sans Mono and Monaco is my favorite 😀

  13. Shishir

    I think code new roman available in open font library is also excellent.

  14. Fellipe

    Inconsolata not work wit PyCharm… 🙁 anyone know why?

  15. don’t forget terminus-font

  16. Gmaster

    Ubuntu Mono for me. Most beautiful monospace font out there IMO

  17. Ding-Yi Chen

    Not quite sure why Deja Vu Mono is missing. The benefits of that are:
    1. Exists long time ago, that is, you can use it in RHEL6.
    2. Easy to tell the difference between 1Il|

    Terminology (Enlightenment’s terminal) has interesting font demo by using following string:

    oislOIS.015!|,

    Deja Vu is one of the font that easily tell them apart.

  18. aeweizoS

    Please add PT Mono

  19. Cat

    This one looks good for me: https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans
    Some folks with dyslexia told this fonts helps a lot.

  20. renegadevi

    Menlo

    It may not be free, but it sure looks great.

  21. adsf

    Liberation Mono needs more mentions. It’s awesome.

  22. Pravin Satpute

    Indeed we have good and active userbase for Liberation Mono..dunno why it miss the list of great Mono fonts.

  23. Matthew Bunt

    Installing Inconsolata is always one of the first things I do on any new installation.

  24. Brian Terry

    I’ve found the Roboto series from the later Android releases to be a good set of fonts overall but particularly the monospaced variety. They can be found here:

    https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto+Mono

  25. Anonymous Coward

    You should add Noto Mono (package google-noto-mono-fonts). The Noto fonts are the successors to the Droid fonts.

  26. For me, Lucida Console followed by Droid Sans Mono.

    But for the console on HD / UltraHD displays, terminus. Fetch and make the font:

    http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/
    cd terminus-font-4.40
    ./configure
    make psf
    make install-psf
    cp /usr/local/share/consolefonts/ter-v32n.psf.gz /lib/kbd/consolefonts/

    vi /etc/vconsole.conf
    FONT=”ter-v32n”

    setfont ter-v32n

  27. Bob

    I’ll test all them today! so far I’ve always used Terminus in terminal.

  28. I prefer Virtual Consoles for the majority of tasks.

    Here’s the content of my /etc/vconsole.conf file:

    KEYMAP=”us-intl”
    FONT=”ter-132n”

    That’s a good looking large font on a 1920×1086 32″ TV (as a monitor).

  29. Fedora Magazine is one of the best things about fedora.
    Awesome work fellas!

  30. Also, Courier Prime.
    Check this font, it’s awesome!

  31. Shattarack

    These are all fine choices. My personal favorite is CamingoCode by Jan Fromm. Among other virtues, the glyphs are exceptionally legible in smaller fonts, with slashed zeros and 1 / l differentiation. It comes in four linked styles. You can find it at no charge on his web site, MyFonts, and other sites.

  32. Curtis Gagliardi

    Fira is beautiful, first font I’ve liked anywhere near as much as fantasque-sans: https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans

  33. What about Iosevka — https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/ ? It’s great, and very compact.

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