Meslo LG Nerd Font
Apple’s Menlo, forked to fix the one thing about it that annoyed people.
What it does
Meslo is a fork of Apple’s Menlo — itself a fork of Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, by way of DejaVu — made to offer a choice of line spacing. Menlo’s line gap is generous, which reads well in a document and wastes vertical space in a terminal. Meslo ships three variants of the same letterforms:
| Variant | Line gap |
|---|---|
MesloLGS | Small — the compact one, and the usual choice |
MesloLGM | Medium — Menlo’s original spacing |
MesloLGL | Large — for wide, low-density displays |
Everything else is Menlo: a plain, wide, extremely legible grotesque with unmistakable 0, O, 1, l and I.
Ligatures and OpenType features
None. Meslo has no programming ligatures and no stylistic sets — it inherits the DejaVu lineage, which predates all of that. There is nothing to turn off.
Notes
- This is the font Powerlevel10k asks you to install. Its configuration wizard recommends
MesloLGS NFspecifically, and the recommendation is baked into enough guides that the file name is more famous than the typeface. - Anything driving Starship or a powerline prompt will be happy with it for the same reason: the glyph coverage is complete and the metrics are predictable.
Alternative to
| Alternative | Type | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Menlo | Built in | Already on the Mac, with no icon glyphs and one line gap |
| Source Code Pro | Open source | Narrower, more contemporary, also ligature-free |
| JetBrains Mono | Open source | Taller, tighter, ligatures included |
| DejaVu Sans Mono | Open source | The common ancestor, and the Linux default |
Install
brew install --cask font-meslo-lg-nerd-font