Retrocide Mono – a Monospaced Font with No Decenders
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
geonot.github.ioTechstory
calmmixed
Debate
60/100
TypographyFont DesignRetro Aesthetics
Key topics
Typography
Font Design
Retro Aesthetics
The Retrocide Mono font, a monospaced font with no descenders, is showcased, sparking discussion on its readability, design choices, and potential use cases.
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- 01Story posted
Oct 3, 2025 at 9:24 PM EDT
3 months ago
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Oct 3, 2025 at 9:25 PM EDT
43s after posting
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28 comments in 48-60h
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Oct 11, 2025 at 6:00 AM EDT
3 months ago
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I started to write actionable suggestions about individual letters but realized it’s probably better to drop this link, which starts at how to draw an ”A” and continues with every letter of the alphabet. https://ohnotype.co/blog/ohno-type-school-a
Do more fonts. Do more things. I thank you.
But that's for using it as my daily driver, which doesn't seem to be the actual motivation.
That said, here's some: I'd love to see multiple weights. Not just bold, the new fonts can have multiple weights. Italic could help also but with the letters staying in the box. Also, the letters are too much to the left to my liking. Large amount of space between letters makes it even more visible.
Of course not: if it did we would be doing it that way everywhere. Typeface design has thousands of years of history, there's only a few major variations in latin types and we've tried them all. Descenders exist for a reason.
This type is pretty cool for what it is meant for, the retro aesthetics. Old school digital displays (like alarm clocks) don't have descenders so it fits pretty well.
Yeah but I wouldn't just assume it's because they are the optimal solution. Look at architectural handwriting, very clear, no descenders.
I just looked it up, and every example I see has descenders in the lowercase letters.
Because it’s apples to oranges.
Deciding “my typeface won’t have any lowercase letters” is not the same as “my typeface won’t have descenders”. Technically none of them has descenders, but the former compromises by reducing the amount of characters—which keeps every remaining letterform distinct at the expense of reading fluidity—while the latter compromises by distorting a good chunk of letters—making them ambiguous and harder to read.
I very much doubt architects decided “let’s write everything in all caps because that avoids descenders”.
And again, while looking it up I see no end of examples of technical writing with lowercase letters, and they all have descenders.
And we're talking about a monospaced font for your terminal. To me, that's more akin to technical drawing than publishing a book.
In my experience technical drawings often use all caps, which have no ascenders/descenders, and you googling specifically to find a counter example doesn't change that. NASA, for example, https://s3vi.ndc.nasa.gov/ssri-kb/static/resources/NASA%20GS...
Makes me want to try and write code in uppercase only (or not).
I like the theme of the website, though!
My main problem is the low height of the lower case letters. For coding I prefer fonts that actually have them slightly taller than normal (namely JetBrains Mono)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet