The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Free font
JetBrains Mono
A free alternative to SF Mono.
About JetBrains Mono
JetBrains Mono is a monospace drawn by Philipp Nurullin at JetBrains and released in 2020, designed around a single measurable goal: making code easier to read for hours at a time. Its lowercase runs unusually tall for the genre, giving each glyph more presence inside the fixed advance width, and characters that are easily confused have been pulled apart so they stay distinct on screen. More than 140 ligatures handle the multi-character operators that code is full of.
As a free code face it is the obvious default for editors, terminals, and any documentation carrying real source. JetBrains Mono is a working tool rather than a display monospace — there is no ornamental streak in it, and at the small sizes an IDE actually uses it stays legible where more stylized fixed-width faces begin to blur. Distributed through Google Fonts, it drops cleanly into web code blocks too.
- Designer
- Philipp Nurullin (JetBrains)
- Released
- 2020
- Available at
- Google Fonts →
JetBrains Mono is also a free alternative to…
- SF Mono → Built specifically for code editors, with a tall x-height and generous counters that keep long lines legible at small sizes. It is slightly wider and more characterful than SF Mono, with distinctive ligatures for programming operators, but it covers the same Xcode and terminal use with an SIL Open Font License.
- Consolas → Designed specifically for code editors, with a tall x-height, open counters and a slashed zero much like Consolas. It is a little more rigid and geometric, with coding ligatures that Consolas lacks, but it delivers the same comfortable long-session readability at small sizes.
- New Heterodox Mono → Built for editors with a tall x-height, open forms and optional ligatures, it serves the same programming use case in a modern sans-serif idiom. Its rectangular, low-contrast shapes are the opposite of New Heterodox Mono's refined serifs, but it is widely hosted and mature.
- NB Architekt → A monoline monospace with tall x-height and restrained, rectangular letterforms that echo NB Architekt's technical precision. It is designed for code, so the shapes are slightly more open and legible at small sizes, and it ships with eight weights plus italics, far more than Neubau's three.
- Pitch Sans → Built for code with tall x-height and open counters, it matches Pitch Sans's legibility at small sizes and offers eight weights with italics. It is more overtly technical and less typewriter-evocative, so it trades Pitch Sans's documentary charm for sharper on-screen clarity.
Display + body that work together
Letters that hold their nerve
The display sets the register; the body follows through. When both halves of a pair pull in the same direction, the design disappears and the words come forward.
Mono · Editorial JetBrains Mono + EB Garamond
The shape of a working week
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 JetBrains Mono + Lora