I drove a version of this for a fairly long time, remembering downloading it from GitHub page, not from the customizer. It's not a bad font by any means. I enjoyed Iosevka a lot while I used it.

But, after using Berkeley Mono for three minutes, I switched to it everywhere in a week or so, and never looked back, or looked anywhere else, to be precise.

Yes, it's not free, and yes it's opinionated. I can say that my opinions align with that font pretty much. It's one of the things which I cherish like an expensive hand tool which really does its job very well and makes you happy with its presence.

[0]: https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono

Truth is it requires getting used to, I don't even notice it's narrow anymore, but it was so painful throughout the first day

Once, I also couldn't fathom how people liked this one.

When I asked, somebody said it fits more characters in terminals and code editors. This sounds incredibly obvious, but for whatever reason that was eye-opening for me and helped me appreciate it a lot more when I tried it again. Now I can't use anything else.

The reason it's so popular is it was (one of?) the first fonts to include tons of programming ligatures. So it gained mindshare early, and since font choices are so personal, the more people use a font, the more people will like and post about it.

A huge helping of praise gets lumped onto Iosevka, from me, for the way it is defined in a custom S-expression DSL.

https://github.com/be5invis/PatEL

It’s a real hackers typeface.

Iosevka is very configurable and have many options for font and individual glyphs. Build supports text file config. At some point I made a config so I can always get preferred setup. It works well for me

I'm also not a fan of the narrow width, but there is an "extended" width version that's more like other mono fonts, which is what I personally use, albeit customized.

Give it a week