Pretty much every font I try has one or two things that bug me. I’ve spent the last ten years making my own, first in FontForge, now in Glyphs.app, but it’s incredibly time-consuming. I’ll work on it for a while, then give up for months, delete everything, switch to a different font, use it for a few days, start hating it… and end up back at making my own font again. This cycle repeats pretty much every year.
You’ll probably want to recommend your favourite font, but trust me, I’ve tried all the well-known ones, and they all have their quirks.
> Google Sans Mono was created in 2020 to support contexts that needed fixed-width characters for editorial design, at medium and large text sizes. Despite this, it soon got its first big product integration, replacing Roboto Mono in Google Chat. The only problem? Developers hated it.
[...]
> Recognizing this critical need, a dedicated effort was launched to craft Google Sans Code, a monospaced typeface specifically designed to make code more readable. This involved thorough research into the 20 most common programming languages and how developers interact with code, aiming to make the new coding typeface more visually appealing while reducing the ambiguity of similar-looking letterforms. Based on these insights, Google tasked the Universal Thirst foundry to meticulously focus on specific letters, numbers, and operators to meet these requirements. The result is an eminently readable and surprisingly playful typeface.
> Google Sans Code launched as an open-source font in 2025, and is the typeface used to display code in Gemini.
Curly braces can be really hard to distinguish from parens because they appear in the same sort of place in e.g. JS, and IDEs and highlighters often render them in stupid low-contrast colours. I hate it aesethetically, but I get the usability need.
Hmm, my first reaction was the same as yours. But I have quite bad eyesight and looking at the "regular 400 at 16px" example on the page reminded me that I definitely sometimes find myself squinting trying to work out whether a character is a parenthesis or a brace (Droid Sans Mono). So I suppose it'd probably be quite helpful to have a brace that's very visually distinct from parenthesis even if it's not particularly pretty on its own.
Squishing it down to <12px I can see that problem, even when compared to other good coding fonts like Jetbrains Mono or a font designed for readability like Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono / Next.
Definitely was too quick with my judgement. Still, it just looks really out of place at bigger font sizes and it makes me wonder if there isn't a more elegant solution out there.
i don't have your skills of actually customizing or changing glyphs in fonts directly but i've customized and used scripts to fix glyph characters available as open type features. I've done this for fonts like:
it really is a sickness. a terrible sickness, if you care deeply about fonts. I know you don't care specifically about recommendations, but inevitably i've found myself gravitating to these fonts:
1. Berkeley Mono (paid)
2. SF Mono (walled)
3. Recursive (truly open and legible)
4. Commit Mono
I love the above fonts, but there's a few characters or quirks that drive me bananas on certain days, so inevitably find myself switching between them.
Pretty much every font I try has one or two things that bug me. I’ve spent the last ten years making my own, first in FontForge, now in Glyphs.app, but it’s incredibly time-consuming. I’ll work on it for a while, then give up for months, delete everything, switch to a different font, use it for a few days, start hating it… and end up back at making my own font again. This cycle repeats pretty much every year.
You’ll probably want to recommend your favourite font, but trust me, I’ve tried all the well-known ones, and they all have their quirks.
Edit: I’m going to try Guguru (“Google” pronounced with a Japanese accent) Sans Code for a few days → https://github.com/yuru7/guguru-sans-code , created by https://x.com/tawara_san