The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Free font
IBM Plex Mono
A free alternative to Courier.
About IBM Plex Mono
IBM Plex Mono is the fixed-width member of the IBM Plex superfamily, the open-source type system Mike Abbink designed as IBM's corporate typeface and released in 2017. It carries a slab-serif character inside the monospace grid, while the drawing and spacing are tuned for contemporary screen rendering and the proportions coordinate with Plex Sans. The temperament is engineered and lightly institutional rather than nostalgic.
Its Courier lineage is direct — Courier was an IBM commission too — which makes Plex Mono the natural modern replacement. It preserves the slab-serif flavor that gives Courier its typewriter identity, redrawn for screens and shipped across a broader weight range than Courier ever offered. Choose it for code, terminals, technical documentation, and tabular data, or wherever the Courier look is wanted without the print-era rendering.
- Designer
- Mike Abbink (IBM)
- Released
- 2017
- Available at
- Google Fonts →
IBM Plex Mono is also a free alternative to…
- Courier → IBM's modern monospaced sibling to Plex Sans — direct lineage to Courier (also IBM-commissioned) but redrawn with contemporary screen rendering, slab-serif character preserved, broader weight range than Courier ever shipped.
- SF Mono → The monospaced member of IBM's corporate family, like SF Mono a fixed-width design made to sit beside a proportional sans. Plex Mono has more visible grotesque personality, with slab-like serifs on i and l and an italic with real cursive forms, so it feels warmer than Apple's cooler, flatter mono.
- Consolas → A monospaced family with a full italic and a wide weight range, drawn alongside IBM's Plex Sans just as Consolas was drawn alongside Calibri. Plex Mono shows more grotesque stiffness and slab-like terminals, so it reads a touch more mechanical than Consolas's softer humanist curves.
- New Heterodox Mono → A fixed-pitch design with slab-like serifs on i, l and r and a distinctly humanist, editorial tone rather than a technical one. It gives a similar typeset quality to code at small sizes, but with low contrast and a full eight weights plus italics and far wider language coverage.
- NB Architekt → IBM's monospace shares the fixed widths and engineered neutrality of NB Architekt and comes in seven weights with italics. Its slab-like terminals and typewriter ancestry give it a warmer, more mechanical feel than Neubau's stripped-down drafting lettering, but it holds the same monospaced tone in labels and captions.
- Pitch Sans → A monospaced sans with a quietly humanist edge and true italics across eight weights, giving a similar spread to Pitch Sans's Light-to-Bold range. Its slightly rationalist IBM character and squarer forms make it a touch more engineered, but the rhythm and texture in running text are very close.
Display + body that work together
Pages that earn the read
A pairing is a relationship: one voice speaks first, the other answers, and the contrast between them sets the tone for the whole page.
Mono · Editorial IBM Plex Mono + EB Garamond
Letters that hold their nerve
Two thousand years of letterforms boil down to a handful of decisions — width, weight, proportion. Pick a pair you trust, and let the rest take care of itself.
Mono · Editorial IBM Plex Mono + Lora