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Intel revives One Mono font after brief retirement during open-source purge — typeface built to fight coder eyestrain gets reprieve
Intel has reversed its decision to shelve its open-source font project designed specifically with developers in mind. The font’s GitHub repository was archived earlier this week, only for the company to reportedly restore the project and potentially continue to maintain it. The cancellation came amid a wider reduction in Intel’s open-source efforts. According to Phoronix, Intel has been closing down projects where development has slowed, or the employees responsible for them have exited the company.
Introduced back in 2023, One Mono is a monospace font where each character occupies the same horizontal width. Intel carried out the development in collaboration with type design studio Frere-Jones Type and marketing agency VMLY&R. Working with low-vision and legally blind developers during the design process, live testing sessions were conducted to identify characters that could be difficult to distinguish when reading code.
“Identifying the typographically underserved low-vision developer audience, we designed the Intel One Mono typeface for maximum legibility to address developers' fatigue and eyestrain and reduce coding errors,” said Intel in its introduction.
The font was designed with several features to improve legibility, including distinctions between similar-looking letters and coding characters. For example, characters such as the lowercase “e” and uppercase “G” were given more distinctive shapes to make them easier to identify. The difference in height between uppercase and lowercase letters was also increased, along with longer ascenders and descenders to make blocks of code easier to read. Additionally, the font supports more than 200 languages using the Latin script and is available in Light, Regular, Medium, and Bold weights, along with matching italics.
As mentioned, One Mono is available under an open-source license; thus, developers are free to use and modify it. Unfortunately, the font has not witnessed any significant updates since 2024, with activity during 2025 reportedly limited to Readme updates. Thus, its archival seemed pretty obvious, especially with Intel shutting down projects that were no longer seeing active development. For now, the font has managed to avoid becoming a casualty of Intel’s open-source cleanup. While the project remains silent, its revival means the developer-focused font is not being abandoned after all.
Kunal Khullar is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. He is a long time technology journalist and reviewer specializing in PC components and peripherals, and welcomes any and every question around building a PC.
That's nice. I've certainly spent hours trying to find the best fixed-width font, at various times in the past. I'll have to make a point of trying this one!
Some fixed-width fonts have readability issues, but others are just plain ugly.
There's a small sample image in their Github repo, which the article should've linked:
https://github.com/intel/intel-one-mono
luckzeh said:
2) what does "lack of updates" mean for a font besides lack of whatever newest silly emojis?
Not sure. Maybe updates, if any of the supported font formats get new features. Maybe (non-emoji) glyphs are occasionally added for some supported languages?
As far as I'm concerned, lack of updates isn't an issue until it is. If the font hasn't been updated by then, just switch to a different one. The comments in the linked Phoronix article list a few other good options.
