Twelve-point Monaco has been my programming font of choice for years.

Today while editing Markdown text I noticed that my editor wasn’t rendering bold or italic markup at all. There was no bug in plasticboy/vim-markdown as I had originally feared; instead it was happening because Monaco only comes with a regular variant. There might be better programming fonts available (maybe B612 Mono) but I would prefer not to go down that rabbit hole.

Fortunately, bold and italic variants of Monaco are available.

The monaco-bold project on GitHub contains three different bold variants of Monaco (20%, 30%, and 40%) as well as an italic variant. However, the variants are made available as regular variants of entirely different fonts rather than as bold and italic variants of the same font. That won’t play well with the guifont setting in Vim.

The monego project on GitHub, which is forked from the monaco-bold project, solves those problems, making available a font called Monego that’s just Monaco with bold and italic variants. It’s missing a bold italic variant but that’s something I could add myself and contribute back if it bothers me too much. UPDATE: A bold italic version got added on April 8, 2019.

I installed the Monego font, set my iTerm2 profiles to use it, and updated my .gvimrc’s font settings to:

set antialias
set guifont=Monego:h12