10 Beautiful Fonts for Your Linux Terminal

Get the best font for your terminal to improve the look, and readability, and have a fun experience with the terminal.
Warp Terminal

Picking the perfect font is crucial for many things, whether you are a programmer, system administrator, or a Linux user fond of the terminal.

Changing the terminal font helps you achieve the following:

  • An aesthetically pleasing look of your terminal
  • Enhances readability
  • Reduces eye strain

Sounds good. But how can you choose the perfect font? There are hundreds and thousands of options out there.

For starters, you can select a font optimized for technical documents or coding because those have good readability. Next, you can filter foss projects (if that matters to you) and check if those fonts scale well with high-resolution monitors (per your requirements).

Fret not; to give you a head start, we have picked some of the best fonts fit for coding, offering good readability while also looking good at the same time.

1. Cascadia

cascadia font

Cascadia is a font by Microsoft, used by default for Visual Studio Code, one of the best open-source code editors.

It includes coding ligature support and offers three variants: standard, mono, and a version supporting embedded powerline symbols.

2. Fira Code

fira code font

Fira Code is a monospaced font with programming ligature and ASCII support.

It is regularly fine-tuned to support letter pairs and better punctuation output.

3. Hack

hack font in terminal

Hack is another monospaced font tailored for source codes.

You get ASCII, powerline support, and the usual styles for bold, italic, and bold italic.

If you notice its GitHub page, they provide instructions to improve the font rendering for certain Linux distributions.

4. Inconsolata

insconsolata font


Inconsolata is a clear monospace font tailored for great readability. You can find it as one of the options in the Google Font family.

The font offers several styles useful for terminal emulators and coding purposes.

5. Iosevka

iosevka font

Iosevka is a clean-looking versatile open-source font built to write code and use in terminals and technical documents.

You can get installation instructions from its GitHub page for other platforms, including Linux.

6. JetBrains mono

The free and open-source typeface is tailored for developers, i.e., JetBrains Mono.

As the name suggests, it is the default font used by the popular developer tools under JetBrains.

7. Meslo NF

meslo nf font

Meslo NF is a font that supports ASCII and icons well in the terminal.

A part of "Nerd Fonts" collection on GitHub, which features good-looking fonts for coding and terminal. You can find the font among the assets in its GitHub releases section.

It looks excellent in shells like Zsh, fish, and others. You can check out our article on lesser-known Linux shells to explore others.

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8. Monoid

monoiosome

Monoid is another open-source font that aims to be useful for coding. With the usual ligature support and light-dark variants, it should be a nice choice for terminals.

9. Ubuntu Monospace

ubuntu monospace

We all love Ubuntu's default font, i.e., Ubuntu Monospace. It is optimized for many languages, high-resolution screens, and good readability.

You do not need to install it if you already use Ubuntu.

10. SourceCode Pro

Source Code Pro is a good mix of everything. While it is optimized for coding environments and developed by Adobe, it offers good readability and look-for terminals.

Recommended Read 📖

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Want a terminal that looks cool or has extra features? Here are the best Linux terminal emulators you can get.

How to Install These Fonts?

You can easily install a font by downloading the TTF or OTF file and then double-clicking on them to open it using Font Viewer to install.

Double click on the ttf file to install it
Double click on the ttf file to install it

To install multiple fonts simultaneously, you can make a new .fonts folder in the home directory and put the font files there. You can check out our guide on installing new fonts for more detailed information.

How to Install New Fonts in Ubuntu and Other Linux Distros
Wondering how to install additional fonts in Ubuntu Linux? Here is a screenshot tutorial to show you how to easily install new fonts.

More ways to customize terminal

Here are a few more ways to customize the look and feel of your terminal.

5 Tweaks to Customize the Look of Your Linux Terminal
Want a beautiful-looking Linux terminal? Here are several ways to tweak the look and feel of your current terminal and make it look beautiful.

Another interesting tool that automatically changes the color scheme of the terminal based on your desktop wallpaper. How cool is that!

Automatically Change Color Scheme of Your Linux Terminal Based on Your Wallpaper
If you are It’s FOSS newsletter subscriber, you already know that we have started a new ‘Terminal Tuesday’ series. In this, you’ll get to read about command line tools or tips/tricks to help you in the terminal. Terminal is not all about serious work, it can be

💬What is your favorite on the list? Do you have better suggestions? Do share your thoughts in the comments below.

About the author
Ankush Das

Ankush Das

A passionate technophile who also happens to be a Computer Science graduate. You will usually see cats dancing to the beautiful tunes sung by him.

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