Developer Creates a Wonderful Programming Font Based On Minecraft

North Carolina-based developer Idrees Hassan loves Minecraft so that he's recently created a monospaced font to program in based on the typeface found in the wildly popular video game. Monocraft gives programmers the experience of being in Minecraft without having to use any assets from the game.

Ars.'s Hassan said, "To be truthful, I made this font for the sheer fun to understand how fonts function." "Existing Minecraft fonts were missing many small details such as proper kerning and pixel size and I decided I'd create my own. Once that was done it was impossible for me from going overboard and turning it into a proper programming font. I now can write Minecraft plugins using the Minecraft font!

Hassan developed the Minecraft font to be used for development purposes. He added some serifs that make letters like "i" and 'l easier to recognize, and also created new programming characters and improved the arrow characters to make it easier to read. (Ligature characters combine popular strings of characters used in operations such as "!=" into a single new character, but they aren't always popular with developers.)

You can download Monocraft from GitHub for no cost (get "Monocraft.otf" on the Releases page). Monocraft is not supported by Microsoft or Mojang and should be considered a fan-project. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux as an OpenType font. Right-click the font file to install it on Windows. On the Mac double-click the font file and choose "Install Font" in the Font Book window that appears.
DESIGN

Prior to that, Hassan created an authentic replica of the Minecraft typeface with variable spacing like the font used in the game. It is also available on GitHub.

Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson originally designed the Minecraft font for an earlier game called Legend of the Chambered, circa 2008. The Minecraft font has retro pixel art that hearkens back to 8-bit and 16-bit console games that was a great match for Notch's low-fi art style. Now it has found a new role as a fun font for developers all over the world.