agave: A Geometric Monospace Typeface With Four Shipping Variants

A Geometric Monospace Family Built as a Side Project

agave is a fixed-width outline typeface family designed and produced by type agaric. The README is direct about its status: it started as an educational and experimental endeavour and remains a hobby project, with the aim of bringing to development environments and terminals a typographic style that is geometrically regular and simple.

That framing matters when you judge the coverage numbers later. A hobby family is unlikely to match a paid family in depth, and the tables in the README report the exact position rather than hiding it.

The project publishes rendered samples that give a fair idea of the design. There is a sample of ASCII glyph distinction, a code sample in C syntax, terminal samples in alacritty, a literary text sample covering ASCII, Greek, Cyrillic and Czech, a sample set titled after a game, and a Unicode sample. The environment for each is stated, including screen resolution, dpi, freetype and libXft versions, so the samples are reproducible rather than aspirational.

The naming has its own logic. Type agaric chose a slightly eponymic name for the first typeface, and Agave refers either to the green plant or to the daughter of Kadmos in mythology. agave is a sister to autonoe and ino, both also by the same author.

Four Variants Cover the Slashed Zero and Bulged Parentheses Cases

The download table is the practical part of the project, because it answers the question most people arrive with: which file do I install. There are four shapes of the family, each in Regular and Bold.

The normal variant is the base family. The slashed zero variant replaces the zero glyph with a slashed form. The bulged parens variant changes the parentheses, which matters for programming fonts where the distinction between parentheses and other curved characters is hard to make at small sizes. The fourth variant combines both changes, slashed zero and bulged parens, for people who want one file with both modifications rather than a choice.

The files are named accordingly, with Agave-Regular.ttf, Agave-Bold.ttf, Agave-Regular-zeroslashed.ttf, Agave-Bold-zeroslashed.ttf, Agave-Regular-parenbulged.ttf, Agave-Bold-parenbulged.ttf, Agave-Regular-zeroslashed-parenbulged.ttf and Agave-Bold-zeroslashed-parenbulged.ttf, and they are downloaded straight from the latest release of the repository.

Two practical points follow. First, the variants are separate font files rather than OpenType stylistic sets, so you pick a file rather than toggling a feature, and a terminal that exposes a font picker gives you four choices where it would normally give you one. Second, the files are TrueType with no bitmap fonts, which is what the build procedure produces.

Coverage Is Even in One Direction Only: 2443 Regular Glyphs, 96 Bold

The progress table is the most informative document in the repository. Regular carries 2443 glyphs across the ascii, latin ext, greek, cyrillic, ipa, math, arrows, box-drawing, braille, powerline and others ranges. Bold carries 96 glyphs, and the only range listed for it is ascii. Italic is listed with 15 glyphs and marked not ready, and BoldItalic has 2 glyphs and is also marked not ready.

So the coverage is asymmetric to a degree that decides who can use the family and who cannot. In a terminal, where almost everything you read is ASCII, the Bold cut is sufficient, and the box-drawing, powerline and braille ranges in the Regular make it a plausible choice for a shell prompt with powerline glyphs. In a prose or typesetting workflow where italic is a requirement, this family is not ready, and the two glyph counts make that plain.

It is also worth reading the Regular figure as a scope statement rather than a boast. Powerline, braille, IPA and mathematical symbols are the ranges that distinguish a programming font from a general monospace, and they are covered in the regular weight only.

Two Licences in One Repository: OFL for the Font, MIT for Everything Else

The licensing section splits the tree in two, and the split is deliberate. The pub/ directory and any documentation anywhere in the project are under the MIT licence, while dist/ and src/ are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. The README adds a note that in the listing's implicit filtering, the MIT licence takes precedence, which appears to be a statement about the listing tool's own behaviour rather than about the intent of the author.

For an end user this arrangement is convenient, since the SIL Open Font License 1.1 is the standard choice for a redistributable typeface and allows embedding in documents and applications. The MIT part covers the images and documents. The repository carries both licence files at the root, LICENSE and LICENSE_MIT, so the terms are available in the tree.

For someone who wants to build on the source, the practical point is that the font sources and the generated files are OFL, and the OFL has its own rules about modification and redistribution of a typeface. This is not legal advice, and the licence text governs rather than this summary, but a fork of a font has obligations that a fork of a script does not.

Generating the Fonts With FontForge and ttfautohint

The build instructions are short and name the tools directly. For the Regular variant, you open src/agave-r.sfd in FontForge, then use File, Generate Fonts, pick TrueType, No Bitmap Fonts and No Rename, and in Options pick TrueType Hints, PS Glyph Names and OpenType before confirming and generating. The README notes that you may see warnings about non-integral coordinates and similar, which you can ignore.

The generated file still needs hinting, which is the ttfautohint step. Assuming the generated file is named raw.ttf, the command is:

ttfautohint -v -t raw.ttf Agave-Regular.ttf

That is the whole pipeline for one variant: author the outlines in FontForge, generate a TrueType binary, hint it.

The acknowledgements section credits the tools honestly, naming bc for measurement, Inkscape for drawing, ttfautohint for hinting and FontForge for generation, along with GitHub for hosting. The project also keeps a CHANGES file for the record of changes since the start, and the repository tree shows the three directories that matter: src/ for the FontForge sources, dist/ for the built fonts and pub/ for the documentation and images.

Installing the TTF Files and Where the Release Lives

The install section is short because fonts are installed by platform convention. The .ttf files are found in one of two places, either at the latest release of the repository or in the dist directory of the master branch, and then installed according to the common procedures for the platform. The README points at repology for the packaged versions and at a general guide covering Windows, Mac and Linux.

So the delivery model is a plain font file rather than a package manager entry of its own. On a Linux system the font ends up in a system or user font directory and is picked up by fontconfig. On macOS it goes into the font collection for the current user or the machine. In a terminal, the practical step after installing is selecting the family and the size in the terminal's own preferences, and the samples in the repository were taken in alacritty at size 5.5, which is a small point size and shows the design at a demanding scale.

The development environment is the one documented constraint worth stating: the samples were produced at 2160x1440 with 200 dpi, freetype v2.10.4, libXft v2.3.3, libpng v1.6.37 and gimp v2.10.20, and the code sample was taken in emacs v27.1 at height 55. If your setup differs, particularly on Windows with a different rasteriser, the appearance will differ from the screenshots.

Version 39 After a Long Gap, and What a Hobby Project Means for Support

The release numbering is plain integers rather than semver, and the README header records the current state as version 39, 15 sep 2026. The tag history shows the gap plainly: release 38 came on 2026-06-20, while the previous tag, v37, dates from 2021-01-06. Between those two points there is a version that moved from 37 to 38, and the earlier tag carries a v prefix while the recent ones do not.

The repository is not archived and the last push was on 2026-09-15, so the project is still receiving work. What that means in practice is stated by the author: agave remains a hobby project, developed by one person with an email address and an issue tracker for feedback.

For an evaluation, the right question is what you need the font to do rather than whether the project is popular. If you want a slashed zero and geometric regularity in a terminal, the Regular cut is well covered and the build recipe is reproducible. If you need italics, or a Bold that covers Greek and Cyrillic, or a family with a long-term support commitment behind it, this repository is the wrong place to look, and the font coverage table tells you so before you install anything.

Editorial conclusion

agave fits a developer who wants a quiet, geometrically regular monospace face, wants a slashed zero or bulged parentheses without hunting for a separate font, and is willing to accept a Bold cut that only covers ASCII. It is a poor fit for a project that needs full italic and bold italic coverage, for heavy Greek, Cyrillic or IPA use in the Bold weight, or for a pipeline that wants a single unambiguous licence across the whole repository. Before building on it, check the glyph counts in the README table, because Italic and BoldItalic are marked not ready, and note that the source and the distributed fonts are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 while the rest of the tree is MIT. The current release is version 39, dated 15 sep 2026, and the last push was on 2026-09-15.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. blobject/agave on GitHub
2. License: OFL-1.1
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases