Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

Do you ever feel like your font treats symbols as second-class glyphs? Are you frustrated that -> looks nothing like an arrow, and $, @, % seem ever mismatched? Want to experience the beauty of ligatures without losing the simplicity of ASCII.

Myna (Gracula religiosa 🐦‍⬛) is a monospace font which aims to bring harmony to your editor by treating symbols as first-class glyphs alongside alphanumeric characters.

Myna was borne out of a need to scratch a persistent typographical itch. While I've tried many otherwise well-crafted monospace fonts, I always found myself wanting to tweak a glyph here or adjust a shape there. After developing Myna and using it almost exclusively in my professional and personal work, I'm sharing it as a small contribution to the wonderful community of monospace typography enthusiasts.

Here are a few of its attractive features that might make it your next favourite monospace font:

• Symbol-First Design: clear emphasis on ASCII symbols which are ubiquitous in programming languages
• Near-Perfect Alignment: multi-character symbols like ->, >>=, =~, :: align seamlessly
• Balanced Weight: symbols have just the right visual weight against your code
• Minimalist Forms: geometric shapes for quotes and commas
• Clear Distinction: no more confusing 1 l I | or 0 O o
• Language-Aware Design: clean sigils for Perl + elegant operators for Haskell + clear symbols for C

NB: Myna is designed to be a simple font. The current release is a single weight without ligatures, though future updates may expand its features if demand arises. It does work out nicely with synthesised bold generated by fontconfig and pango on Linux.

1. Download the release
2. Right-click Myna.otf and select "Install for all users"

SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1

Myna started out as Hera which was a customised version of Source Code Pro but now has come a long way after stealing many beautiful designs from Fira Mono, Inconsolata, Plex Mono, Office Code Pro, Anonymous Pro. Detailed credits could be found in the Hera repository.

Code banner and illustrations were produced using ImageMagick and Ray.so.

Myna is designed to be used universally in every kind of terminal and editor. I've tried reasonable subset of non-ASCII glyphs (mostly related to geometrical and mathematical characters). However, I'm considering expanding it based on community interest and would welcome contributions in these areas:

• Bug Reports: spacing and kerning issues, rendering problems, unavailable/incorrect glyphs
• Feature Requests: Suggest new glyphs or features via GitHub Issues

Please feel free to open issues and also contact me at [email protected].