Paper Term

Paper Term is a terminal and agent-friendly font for people who spend most of their day in front of a terminal window. It's cut from Paper Mono, the new open-source monospace font from Paper, and all the design credit goes to them.

Why

Most monospace fonts are designed for people who write code full-time. A lot of us don't. We live in TUIs like Claude Code, Codex and Hermes, and our terminal time is hybrid: reading an agent's explanations, plans and tables as much as reading code. A font tuned only for brackets and operators makes long paragraphs tiring to read.

Paper Mono reads comfortably as prose and as code. Paper Term keeps that and turns on the features that suit a terminal: a single-story a, a slashed zero and coding ligatures. Most terminals and TUIs only let you choose a font family, so you get all three just by picking Paper Term, with no settings to find.

In agent TUIs

Real prompts and replies, each mixing prose, tables and code, shown in Ghostty at 14px.

Claude Code

Codex

opencode (Claude Haiku 5.5 on OpenCode Go)

Hermes Agent (startup banner cropped out)

Install with your agent

Copy this prompt into Claude Code, Codex or any coding agent that can run commands on your machine:

Install the Paper Term font for me.

1. Download https://github.com/sincereTrader/paper-term/releases/download/v1.0/PaperTerm-v1.0.zip into a new temporary folder and unzip it.
2. Install every .otf file from the zip for my user account:
   - macOS: copy them into ~/Library/Fonts
   - Linux: copy them into ~/.local/share/fonts, then run fc-cache -f
   - Windows: copy them into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Fonts and register each one under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts
3. Confirm the font family "Paper Term" is now installed, then delete the temporary folder.
4. Find out which terminal app I use, show me the setting that switches its font family to "Paper Term", and change it only if I say yes. Then tell me to fully quit and reopen the terminal.

Don't change any other settings on my machine.

What's different from Paper Mono

Feature	Paper Mono	Paper Term
cv01 single-story a	Off	On
zero slashed zero	Off	On
ss01 coding ligatures	Off	On (folded into calt)
ss04 small arrows	Off	Off
ss02 duospace, ss03 narrow space	Off	Off: these break a terminal's fixed character grid

Everything else is untouched: same glyphs, same metrics, all 8 weights from Thin (100) to ExtraBold (800).

In a real terminal

Screenshots from Ghostty at 15px, using its default theme. Run the scripts in demo/ to see it in your own terminal.

Install manually

1. Download the latest zip from Releases, or grab the files in fonts/otf.
2. macOS: double-click each .otf and choose Install, or copy them into ~/Library/Fonts. Windows: right-click the files and choose Install. Linux: copy them into ~/.local/share/fonts and run fc-cache -f.
3. Fully quit and reopen your terminal so it picks up the new font.

Set it in your terminal

TUIs like Claude Code, Codex, Vim, Neovim and htop use whatever font your terminal uses, so set it once in the terminal and they all pick it up.

Terminal	Setting
Ghostty	font-family = "Paper Term" in your config
Kitty	font_family Paper Term in kitty.conf
WezTerm	config.font = wezterm.font("Paper Term")
Alacritty	[font.normal] then family = "Paper Term". Alacritty doesn't render ligatures
iTerm2	Settings → Profiles → Text → Font, and tick Use ligatures
Windows Terminal	Settings → your profile → Appearance → Font face
VS Code	"terminal.integrated.fontFamily": "Paper Term", plus "editor.fontFamily" for the editor
Orca	Settings → Terminal → Font Family. Set Terminal Ligatures to on if ligatures don't show

The single-story a and the slashed zero work everywhere. Ligatures depend on the app: if != and -> still look like separate characters, look for a ligatures setting in your terminal or editor.

Build it yourself

Paper Term is built from Paper Mono v1.0 with one small script. When Paper releases a new version, you can rebuild it yourself:

pip install fonttools
python scripts/build.py path/to/paper-mono/fonts/otf fonts/otf

To pick different features, edit BAKED_SINGLE_SUBS and FOLDED_INTO_CALT at the top of scripts/build.py.

Notes

• Not maintained. I made this for my own setup and published it as is. It won't track new Paper Mono releases, so use the script above to rebuild from a newer version.
• Unofficial. Paper Term isn't made or endorsed by Paper. It's a community remix.

License

Paper Mono is Copyright 2025 The Paper-Mono.Git Project Authors (github.com/paper-design/paper-mono) and licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. As a modified version, Paper Term is released under the same license, with a different name, as the OFL requires. The build script is free to use under the same terms.