Departure Mono

A monospaced face drawn on a pixel grid rather than smoothed onto one, built from the look of early command lines and late-90s screen fonts.

Homebrew cask Direct download

What it does

Departure Mono is a bitmap design shipped as an OTF: the outlines are square pixels, so it renders as crisp blocks instead of the anti-aliased edges every other family here produces. One weight, one width, no italic — there is no family to choose from, which is part of the appeal.

Because the glyphs are pixels, size matters more than usual. Off-grid sizes put pixel edges between device pixels and the whole thing turns soft, so pick a size that lands on the grid and stay there rather than nudging it a point at a time.

No Nerd Font build exists, so a terminal running Starship or lsd needs Symbols Nerd Font as a fallback for the icon glyphs.

The OpenType features are onum, frac and the stylistic sets ss01 and ss02. There is no calt and no liga — the ligature switches in the table on the section page do nothing here, because there are no ligatures to turn off.

Alternative to

Alternative	Type	Trade-off
Tiny5	Open source	Five pixels tall, so a display face rather than a terminal font
Monocraft	Open source	Minecraft letterforms, and the associations that come with them
Pixel Code	Open source	Programming ligatures, which this has none of
Terminus	Open source	Bitmap formats only, which GUI applications often refuse
JetBrains Mono Nerd Font	Open source	Legible at any size, with none of the character