maple-font
No description available.
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Oct 2026
Maple Mono is a free coding font with rounded corners, a cursive italic, smart ligatures and built-in Nerd Font icons for terminals. Its author built it because JetBrains Mono felt too rigid, Fira Code lacked real italics and Victor Mono was a bit much, and it lands between them. SIL Open Font License 1.1: personal and commercial use are fine.
Install takes a minute: brew install --cask font-maple-mono-nf, Scoop, Nix, the Arch repos, or a zip from Releases. The real work is picking the build. NF adds terminal icons, CN embeds Chinese and Japanese glyphs at an exact 2:1 width so mixed-language Markdown tables line up, NL drops ligatures entirely. Hinted builds suit 1080p and lower screens, unhinted suits Retina. Don't like a glyph? Freeze or strip OpenType features in the web playground, a GitHub Actions run, Docker, or python build.py. Solo, small teams, big teams: free, no tiers.
The catch: the stable release, v7.9, is from December 2025 and the v7 branch is frozen. New work, including Korean, lives in V8, which has been in beta since August and is not officially released. CJK spacing also runs wider than most CJK fonts on purpose.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFree: Everything. Every Maple Mono variant (ligature, no-ligature, the --normal preset, NF icons, CN, variable, TTF, OTF, WOFF2) ships under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. There is no paid edition; the author takes optional sponsorship through Afdian.
Self-hosted: Nothing to run. Install with Homebrew, Scoop, Nix, the ArchLinuxCN/AUR packages or the Release zips, or load it on the web from Fontsource. Custom builds need Python 3 and pip (or Docker), and a CN build downloads about 111 MB of base fonts.
Paid: No paid tier. The OFL lets you bundle and redistribute the font with your own software, including commercial products. The one restriction: the font may not be sold by itself.
Free under the OFL with no paid edition. The only decision is which build: NF for terminal icons, CN for Chinese and Japanese, NL if you hate ligatures.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- free; one brew or scoop install
- Small team
- free; agree on the exact build (NF, CN, NL) so everyone renders the same
- Medium team
- free; pin v7.9 in dev setup scripts until V8 ships stable
- Large team
- free; OFL allows bundling in images and products, just never sell the font on its own
Get tools like this every Wednesday
One featured tool, three on the radar. No fluff.
A low score is not a verdict on quality. Young and niche tools start low by design. How we calculate scores
Trust Signals
License: SIL Open Font License 1.1
Free for commercial use and bundling; the font cannot be sold by itself.
Commercial use: ✓ Yes
About
- Owner
- subframe7536 (Organization)
- Stars
- 29,682
- Forks
- 1,221
Explore Further
More tools in the directory
rea
Reverse engineer anything with agents, from app behavior down to native binaries.
435.8k ★openclaw
Your own personal AI assistant. Any OS. Any Platform. The lobster way. 🦞
394.0k ★everything-claude-code
The agent harness performance optimization system. Skills, instincts, memory, security, and research-first development for Claude Code, Codex, Opencode, Cursor and beyond.
298.1k ★