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"Hack" Typeface Is Open Source, Easy On the IDEs

Posted by timothy on from the get-it-easy-on-the-eye-dee-never-mind dept.

Ars Technica writes that "At SourceFoundry.org this week, programmer Chris Simpkins debuted the 2.0 version of Hack, an open-source typeface designed specifically for use in source code." The revamped font is "characterized by a large x-height, wide aperture, and low contrast design in order to be 'highly legible' at common coding text sizes," and the font specimen shows how legible it is right down to downright tiny sizes, though Simpkins says the sweet spot is between 8 and 12 pixels. Hack's roots are in the libre, open source typeface community, and the project expands upon the contributions of the Bitstream Vera & DejaVu projects. ... Simpkins has been working on the project throughout 2015, and he tweeted that this latest version includes "new open type features, changes in weights, significant changes in spacing, Powerline glyphs, and more." The typeface now comes with four font styles: Regular, Bold, Oblique, and Bold Oblique.

137 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. That's great and all... by beelsebob · · Score: 4, Interesting

    But where can I see it? Where's the damn link?

    1. Re:That's great and all... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Linky here: http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/

      Is there a point to having editors on slashdot anymore?

    2. Re:That's great and all... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 3, Funny

      If you have to ask, turn in your hacker creds and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. :)

    3. Re:That's great and all... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      GoogleFTFA

      ...to let the NSA know you are interesting in hacking, changing face types, and IDE's (improvised detonation explosives.)

      Oh well, you're probably already on a watch list so a few more terrorist buzzwords associated with your name is probably no big deal.

    4. Re:That's great and all... by fisted · · Score: 2

      You see, it's open source and all.

      That said, does anyone know how to build that font from source? Nothing about it on their website, or in the README...

      --
      CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
    5. Re:That's great and all... by znrt · · Score: 1

      probably a nice font, but unfortunately the nice web decided to ignore my browsers's zoom function. so to the authors, get back to me when you get the basics on accessibility right. thanks but no thanks ....

    6. Re:That's great and all... by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 1

      In TFA, it is explained that this design eliminates zero/oh, 5/S and 6/G confusion, especially at smaller sizes when you're trying to get as much code context as you can onto your development screen.

    7. Re:That's great and all... by Rob+Y. · · Score: 1

      ..except for the detached dot on the i, which looks nothing like the l. At least the lowercase L looks way different from the uppercase i, which is typically much more of a problem in coding fonts. Likewise O (uppercase oh) and 0 (zero).

      --
      Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
    8. Re:That's great and all... by kmoser · · Score: 1

      Simple: you eyeball the full-rendered font, then enter the bitmap for each character using hex codes. In other words, you reverse-engineer it like any good hacker would do.

    9. Re:That's great and all... by fisted · · Score: 1

      Heh, except it's not a bitmap font. FWIW I discovered "fontforge" which can open the compiled font and lets me edit it, but that's of course the wrong approach..

      --
      CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
    10. Re:That's great and all... by RyoShin · · Score: 1

      Who else would shill Dice posts without mentioning conflict of interest?

    11. Re:That's great and all... by RyoShin · · Score: 1

      Only after they updated the summary.

  2. Link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Fantastic, an article without links...

    I know we don't read articles around here, but are we ready to give up even the pretense?

  3. Gotta love that link... by WolphFang · · Score: 2

    Gotta love that link to the original article ...

    --
    leather-dog muksihs
    Blog: @muksihs
  4. Here's the article by innocent_white_lamb · · Score: 4, Informative

    I know I know.. nobody reads the article. But here's the link:

    http://arstechnica.com/informa...

    --
    If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
    1. Re:Here's the article by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's a simple, clean font.
      He took special care to make sure l,I, and 1 all look different, as well as 0, O.
      Looks good at low resolution.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:Here's the article by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The site renders the font in the browser, which often looks different to the IDE. Would be nice to have samples from different operating systems.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    3. Re:Here's the article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Meh, serifs really don't scale well to lower point sizes. For a font that's designed to be used on the screen, it's not surprising they chose to avoid them.

    4. Re:Here's the article by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 1

      Serif fonts suck onscreen.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    5. Re:Here's the article by Misagon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That looks exactly like the font that is already used as default fixed-width font in my five-year-old install of Ubuntu ...

      --
      "We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
    6. Re:Here's the article by flargleblarg · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I would like this font a lot more if the zero had a slash through it instead of that ridiculous ellipse in the center.

    7. Re:Here's the article by flargleblarg · · Score: 1

      Depends on your screen resolution. On a retina device, they look great. (I don't use them for coding, though.)

    8. Re:Here's the article by TeknoHog · · Score: 1
      From the site:

      Strategically placed serifs improve the rhythm of the monospaced text by eliminating large gaps on each side of narrow characters and help to distinguish glyphs like the lowercase l and number 1 at small text sizes.

      To me, the i and the l are rather ugly. I wouldn't even call those one-sided hooks serifs. The word reminds me of "sheriff" and Wild West newspaper titles with those big bulky I-beams in capitals. Kids these days, they wouldn't know what a fscking I-beam is, given all these unmanly fonts on their Iphones (back in the day, we used capitals in the beginning of proper nouns, and only in the beginning).

      With those semi-serifs on top and the lower turns, the i and the l have too much of a Z character (right, down, right). Similar hooks are OK in some fonts, but these take the idea too far.

      If you really want to avoid irregular spaces, just don't use a monospace font.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
    9. Re:Here's the article by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Yeah that's weird, but they did it so it would scale down better. (And I'll be honest, to my eyes, a slash looks like a ridiculous europeanism).

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    10. Re:Here's the article by pedantic+bore · · Score: 3, Informative

      The underscores are awful. Almost invisible.

      --
      Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
    11. Re:Here's the article by gnupun · · Score: 2

      It's a simple, clean font.

      Yes, more open source copycatting proprietary software as "hack" looks like a direct ripoff of Monaco or Menlo fonts found in OS X. How did they get past the copyright lawyers? Although I read somewhere on slashdot that fonts are not copyrightable in the US.

    12. Re:Here's the article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Adjust the level of "hinting" your OS takes from the rendering suggestions built into the font. It makes a huge difference.

    13. Re:Here's the article by BasilBrush · · Score: 1

      Yes, it doesn't seem to offer any advantage over menlo - which does have a proper slashed zero.

    14. Re:Here's the article by BasilBrush · · Score: 1, Offtopic

      Mate, the A-Z alphabet came from Europe, and 0-9 came from Europe/Middle East/India.

      America didn't invent any of it.

    15. Re:Here's the article by lucm · · Score: 4, Funny

      I like the way it looks good all the way down to 8pt, and is legible even in 7pt. Not that I'll be reading such tiny code, but many quite a few otherwise-excellent fonts I've looked at over the last few years seem to go a bit funny below 12pt.

      I love 7pt fonts, they allow me to pack a lot more regex in my Perl one-liners.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    16. Re:Here's the article by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      So true, but each country has its own idiosyncrasies in how it writes the characters.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    17. Re:Here's the article by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Interesting. Apparently, at one time fonts were not copyrightable. But now they cann be.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    18. Re:Here's the article by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Yeah that's true, lol, Menlo even has the differentiation between I, l, and 1.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    19. Re:Here's the article by Oligonicella · · Score: 1

      An actual, out-loud laugh. Thank you.

    20. Re:Here's the article by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 1

      Yes, it doesn't seem to offer any advantage over menlo

      I've never really been a big fan of Menlo, the characters just seem... fat to me, the weight is too high. My preferred coding font is Consolas.

    21. Re:Here's the article by sbaker · · Score: 1

      Menlo is nice at larger point sizes (I think they recommend 11 point and higher) - but Hack is optimised for 8 to 10 point and looks pretty good down at 6 and 7 point...and for programmers, the more text you can cram onto a screen, the better.

      --
      www.sjbaker.org
    22. Re:Here's the article by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 2

      It's a simple, clean font.
      He took special care to make sure l,I, and 1 all look different, as well as 0, O.
      Looks good at low resolution.

      So what you're saying is that it's like Inconsolata, but fourteen years late, and slashvertised.

    23. Re:Here's the article by MrKaos · · Score: 1

      It's a simple, clean font. He took special care to make sure l,I, and 1 all look different, as well as 0, O. Looks good at low resolution.

      Indeed yes, I've just installed the odf hack font in ~/.fonts of my cygwin install and a simple

      xterm -fa "Hack-Regular" -fs "10" &

      shows it to be a very readable, now default, font for me. It is still quite readable even at 8 points!.

      --
      My ism, it's full of beliefs.
    24. Re:Here's the article by gfxguy · · Score: 1

      In broadcasting we even have to pay royalties, we can't just buy the font.

      --
      Stupid sexy Flanders.
    25. Re:Here's the article by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      That's crazy. What do you do, mainly use royalty free fonts?

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    26. Re:Here's the article by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      Technically the slashed zero is a different mathematical symbol. At least it is very close to it.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    27. Re:Here's the article by cornelius1729 · · Score: 1

      Placing it side by side with Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, almost all the characters are near-identical (though a bit lighter weight). The only two that differ are the zero (made worse by the ellipse), and the lowercase i, improved by a nice rightwards curl.

      --
      1729 = 9^3 + 10^3 = 1^3 + 12^3
    28. Re:Here's the article by Gestahl · · Score: 1

      And that mathematical symbol (empty set) is in Unicode.

    29. Re:Here's the article by paulatz · · Score: 2

      It's a simple, clean font.

      Yes, more open source copycatting proprietary software as "hack" looks like a direct ripoff of Monaco or Menlo fonts found in OS X. How did they get past the copyright lawyers? Although I read somewhere on slashdot that fonts are not copyrightable in the US.

      Menlo is based upon the Open Source font Bitstream Vera and the public domain font Deja Vu (info embedded inside the font itself).

      --
      this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
    30. Re:Here's the article by Jorgensen · · Score: 1

      I would like this font a lot more if the zero had a slash through it instead of that ridiculous ellipse in the center.

      Zero with a slash through it? You're so US centric!

      So the letter 'Ø' is unknown to you I guess... I really don't want 'Ø' confused with '0' ...

    31. Re:Here's the article by flargleblarg · · Score: 1

      Is that the "null set" symbol? Just kidding. Yeah, I am actually not a fan of the slashed zero either, but I'd prefer it to the dotted zero. My actual preference is for a zero with nothing inside it, and for the capital O to be shorter and rounder. The font Lucida Console is my favorite for monospace terminal/coding work.

    32. Re:Here's the article by mr_mischief · · Score: 1

      There are definitely similarities. I was just looking at it side by side with Monaco (which was my terminal and coding font already, so I have a vested interest in comparison) and with Menlo, though. There are similarities but I don't think it would be confused with either of them. Plus, it doesn't seem Monaco has multiple faces whereas Hack has regular, bold, oblique, and bold oblique. Those aren't as important if you're only using it for source, but reading text in the terminal the difference can be noticeable.

    33. Re:Here's the article by Eythian · · Score: 1

      I switched it over and noticed a small change, the one I mostly noticed was that tails of some letters were different. Overall it was very similar though.

    34. Re:Here's the article by Agripa · · Score: 1

      The lack of a slash through the zero was the first thing I noticed. When writing I have made it a habit of adding slashes to the 0, 7, and Z.

  5. No links? by Ostrich25 · · Score: 1

    No link to the article or the actual typeface being discussed? I'd call this lazy reporting, but it isn't even news. It's just a blurb.

  6. SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid by lesincompetent · · Score: 1

    Thanks for the link, i was really curious about what it looked like.

    1. Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 1

      Looks pretty good at 8px to me.

      I also note that it's got support for Latin-Extended, Cyrillic, and Greek, which is useful for me.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    2. Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's a monospace font... How can you shout about kerning?

    3. Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid by Joce640k · · Score: 1

      no link because code in it actually looks like ass and is hard to read

      Agree. Modifying the 'i' look like an 'l' was a neat trick. I would never have thought of doing that.

      Still, it looks like it was designed for people who think white-on-black is a good color scheme for text. You can't expect too much.

      PS: And how would "low contrast" be seen as a good thing? Beats me.

      --
      No sig today...
    4. Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid by flargleblarg · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Keming problem?? It's a monospace font, dude. Keming is a non-issue.

      Leading, on the other hand, is a problem for me with this font. Too much leading (inter-line spacing). I want it a lot tighter vertically.

    5. Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid by sdxxx · · Score: 2

      This is terrible for a laptop without a lot of vertical screen height. Because of all the extra space between lines for this font, I lose a whole line of text on my laptop compared to DejaVu Sans Mono at the same size (and width). Looks okay on the big screen, though.

    6. Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid by iggymanz · · Score: 2

      too much of letters can be too close in a monospace; in fact it takes a particular kind of fail to screw kerning up for a monospace font but they did

    7. Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      Easily, they have too much of letters' parts mashed too close to each other even though it's monospaced, and that makes it hard to read. That is a type of bad kerning, and to screw it up with a monospace takes a particular lack of attention to holistic font design

    8. Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid by narcc · · Score: 1

      You're only half right. Think: "how each character is positioned within it's little box" and you'll understand what he means.

      --
      Required reading for internet skeptics
    9. Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      I prefer white on black. Mostly because it doesn't send so much light into your room. And in low light situations it is easer on the eyes.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    10. Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid by Joce640k · · Score: 1

      Doesn't it hurt your eyes when you switch back and forth between the editor and slashdot?

      --
      No sig today...
    11. Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid by mr_mischief · · Score: 1

      There's no external kerning. In a monospace font all the font spacing is designed into the typeface. People are saying the fonts are not positioned properly in their monospaced boxes, running together or leaving too large of gaps. Its end result is very similar to bad kerning.

    12. Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid by Eythian · · Score: 1

      There was absolutely no vertical or horizontal size change in the terminal when I changed mine over.

  7. Re:With Links by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Also, "font specimen" could link to:
    http://chrissimpkins.github.io/Hack/font-specimen.html

  8. It's a hacked Deja Vu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's Deja Vu Sans Mono with some questionable changes to glyph shapes, sizes, and spacing. There's a sore lack of comparison with other programming fonts; Ars is making it out as though we've all been stuck on Courier New until this point, but that's ridiculous. I'd like to see a comparison with, e.g., Consolas, Deja Vu Sans Mono, Courier New, and others.

    1. Re:It's a hacked Deja Vu by Dracos · · Score: 1

      I really prefer zero with a dot instead of a slash, but I don't like the oval this zero has in it. It's not vertically centered in the regular variant, and gets reduced to an incongruously thin sliver in bold.

    2. Re:It's a hacked Deja Vu by nmb3000 · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's Deja Vu Sans Mono with some questionable changes to glyph shapes, sizes, and spacing.

      This is exactly what it is. Hack is nothing more than Deja Vu Sans Mono with some crappy amateur edits. For example, the line in the zero, the changes to the i and a -- all are horrible. I also don't like the increased vertical height, since the widescreen monitor plague has made vertical space a premium. I can only assume Hack came from someone grabbing the source for Deja Vu and messing around with it.

      Here are some examples of commonly recommended programming fonts, if you want to compare (open in new tabs for easy comparison):

      Hack
      Deja Vu Sans Mono
      Consolas
      Lucida Console
      Anonymous Pro

      I primarily use Deja Vu and Consolas, depending on what I'm doing. There's no way I'd switch either of them to Hack.

      --
      "What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
      /)
    3. Re:It's a hacked Deja Vu by flargleblarg · · Score: 1

      I agree. The oval zero is a showstopper for me. My favorite zero is actually the one that Lucida Console has — it's thinner and taller than the capital letter O, with no slash or dot in it — but at least I can tolerate a slashed zero. This? Not so much.

    4. Re:It's a hacked Deja Vu by SLi · · Score: 1

      Some of the changes seem nice to me, some of them bad, and some neutral. However I use DejaVu regularly and some of these might be just a matter of getting used to. The biggest changes are to i and 0 (zero).

      Here's an animated gif from Reddit: http://i.imgur.com/8SqL6mT.gif

      The changes I like are to comma, underscore and minus.

      I don't quite understand their changes to i and 0 (zero); do they solve some problem or do they supposedly just look better? I like DejaVu's zero more. It seems to me the new i is closer to l (lowercase L) than in DejaVu, and I cannot imagine DejaVu's i being confused with anything; however I think I could live with the new i. DejaVu's original parentheses are better too; the new ones almost look like if there's a space in ().

      There seems to be a tiny kerning change to r. It makes some words look better, but others look worse. For example, I think "import" looks better in Hack, but "Keyboard" and "Interrupt" in DejaVu.

    5. Re:It's a hacked Deja Vu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Large x-height means the font looks bigger, so it is readable at smaller point sizes. A small x-height means that letters like x or e are small compared to tall letters like X or h, resulting in lots of white space, which is good for separating lines but not so good for reading at small sizes.

    6. Re:It's a hacked Deja Vu by Oligonicella · · Score: 1

      since the widescreen monitor plague has made vertical space a premium

      I seriously do not understand what you mean. Buy a square screen monitor.

    7. Re:It's a hacked Deja Vu by CoderJoe · · Score: 1

      Anonymous Pro's is awful. Mainly "a", "c", "e", and "s".

    8. Re: It's a hacked Deja Vu by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 1

      Journalists are not developers

      Exactly, you can't possibly expect journalists to do any research for the story they're writing, I mean that would be crazy.

      so they wouldn't know there was anything after Courier New. Heck, they didn't know there was a New version to Courier.

      In any case New Courier never really took off, it was replaced after only a few months by Courier Classic (which was really just standard Courier re-branded).

    9. Re:It's a hacked Deja Vu by hankwang · · Score: 1

      "For example, the line in the zero, the changes to the i and a -- all are horrible."

      Could yo explain.why the new 'i' is horrible but not the original 'l' (ell)? And I don't quite see any difference in 'a' in these two comparisons.

      http://gfycat.com/SomberUnited...
      http://i.imgur.com/8SqL6mT.gif

      --
      Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
    10. Re:It's a hacked Deja Vu by nmb3000 · · Score: 1

      Agreed. I only included it since it seems to be mentioned every time the topic of programming fonts comes up.

      --
      "What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
      /)
    11. Re:It's a hacked Deja Vu by nmb3000 · · Score: 1

      I don't know how that animated GIF was created, but when I looked at the font on my Windows machine I saw the pictures I linked in my original comment. If I left both font sizes at 10 points, Hack was taller than DejaVu. If I changed Hack to 9 points, it was the same height but narrower. In both cases, the a glyph has a curve on the top in DejaVu and is flat in Hack. Perhaps this is a quirk of how the TTF renders in Windows, or maybe the GIF uses a font size of something like 9.5.

      I personally don't like the i because there's not much room between the dot and the little curve at the top of the lower line. I think DejaVu's i is a lot easier to immediately identify.

      --
      "What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
      /)
    12. Re:It's a hacked Deja Vu by mr_mischief · · Score: 1

      One can also go portrait mode on a widescreen.

    13. Re:It's a hacked Deja Vu by mr_mischief · · Score: 1

      I'm unconcerned with the 'i'. I like the changes to underscore, parentheses, and '0'. With Hack someone might actually be able to convince me that spaces after the opening parenthesis and before the closing parenthesis don't help legibility too much. With most fonts, I really like those extra spaces.

    14. Re:It's a hacked Deja Vu by mirix · · Score: 1

      Ars is making it out as though we've all been stuck on Courier New until this point, but that's ridiculous.

      You say that like it's a problem.

      They'll take Courier from my cold dead hands.

      --
      Sent from my PDP-11
    15. Re:It's a hacked Deja Vu by hankwang · · Score: 1

      OK, I was reading and posting from a phone screen while commuting. From a laptop screen and based on your screenshots, I agree. The Hack-i looks like a tiny backslash, quite disrupting the flow of reading. The Hack-a at your rendering looks like a small 8 when viewed from a distance, unlike the Dejavu-a.

      Next time you post screenshots, make sure that they will fit in a browser window with menu bar on a 1366x768 sceen, though. The browser was messing them up by an additional scaling.

      --
      Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
    16. Re:It's a hacked Deja Vu by toddestan · · Score: 1

      Unfortunately, one doesn't have a choice when it comes to laptops. Though the high DPI 4K screens that have FINALLY arrived on the market finally convinced me to give up the 1600x1200 20" monitors and go with a widescreen. Still not crazy about the 16:9 but the 2160 vertical pixels is pretty awesome.

  9. no comic sans??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Does this mean I have to abandon comic sans for my Visual basic coding in MS VS??

    1. Re:no comic sans??? by lucm · · Score: 1

      Time to start your rehabilitation.

      http://www.comicsanscriminal.c...

      --
      lucm, indeed.
  10. Hack easy on the IDEs .. by nickweller · · Score: 1

    How do you add this to Firefox or Chrome under Linux?

    1. Re:Hack easy on the IDEs .. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Font goes into /usr/share/fonts/

      You can make a directory or add to the truetype folder, your choice.

      After that, simply select the font in the browser. Firefox it's Preferences -> Content -> Default Font.

    2. Re:Hack easy on the IDEs .. by geantvert · · Score: 1

      Or if you are not root, drop it into ~/.fonts/

  11. Adobe Source Code Pro by redfood · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It looks similar to Adobe Source Code Pro.

    Similar design goals . Also open source on github.

    To my eyes Source Code Pro looks more refined.

    1. Re:Adobe Source Code Pro by NoMoreFood · · Score: 1

      I haven't dove into the bug system, but Notepad++ recently switched to Source Code Pro but then switched back in its most recent release "due to several incompatibility issues". Unsure if the problems were Source Code Pro, Notepad++, Windows, or a combination.

  12. Not really good by ceeam · · Score: 1

    It's quite ugly. The letter "i" for example, gahh. And too wide (can we say "kerning" about the fixed width fonts?).
    Instantly back to "Consolas".

    1. Re:Not really good by Pharago · · Score: 1

      oh yeah, all those inlines unaligned, jokes aside it looks larger at 10pt

  13. non-ASCII by mcswell · · Score: 1

    Nice that it includes some non-ASCII chars (extended Latin-1). But not IPA, which makes it hard for linguists. There are plenty of variable width fonts that cover IPA etc., but fewer fixed width fonts.

    That said, I'm pretty sure it's a small minority of users who need this...perhaps one (me). (I used it when writing up computational linguistics in XeLaTeX.) So I'm not complaining!

    1. Re:non-ASCII by vlueboy · · Score: 1

      Nice that it includes some non-ASCII chars (extended Latin-1). But not IPA, which makes it hard for linguists. There are plenty of variable width fonts that cover IPA etc., but fewer fixed width fonts.

      That said, I'm pretty sure it's a small minority of users who need this...perhaps one (me). (I used it when writing up computational linguistics in XeLaTeX.) So I'm not complaining!

      A digression first:
      With all the nasty data collection on today's downloaded freeware, I find it to be an awesome breath of fresh air when slashdot brings us truly no-strings attached free stuff.

      Its "(useful) Stupid (Unix|Emacs|xxxxxx)" series was short-lived, but it was cool. And I just can't believe it was all the way back in 2008 - http://ask.slashdot.org/story/...

      *To the point, now,* this about a free fixed-width font for my IDE, specially after I've been looking for something like the Coffee font in my LG phone, but without its annoying filled-in o glyphs.

      I grok IPA and though I'd never considered its need to be supported before, since my attention has been caught but Windows 7 and Kitkat's issues with more common symbols, it's a shame to hear I wouldn't be able to make use of the IPA that Wikipedia takes so seriously when I'm looking at foreign terms. The cool thing is, routing back to you and I, that on http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/ it says there are 22 contributors with 1530+ glyphs. Unfortunately Unicode apparently supports way more than 65K total chars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode has some 150k number listed on the recent versions)

      You probably guess what I'm asking for here... it's a lot easier to contribute "solving" even a single glyph per slashdotter to make this font what you and I need, than doing other open source bug fixes so common here. "If you don't like it, the source is there, go FIX it" is annoying, but here the nature of the problem is O(n)-difficulty menial work, rather than having some years-unresolved bug that requires x language and y libraries, then finding a rootcause, issuing a clean fix, then testing it, and then getting it approved for upstream.

      So it'd be nice if appearing here would get even 1% of slashdotters doing something nice with those holes left in the font. We still have to learn font-glyphing, whatever that entails, but it's probably less menial than any coding fixes we might contribute to the world. Why aren't there more crowd-sourcing tasks of this type here on slashdot?

    2. Re:non-ASCII by techno-vampire · · Score: 1

      My understanding is that it was designed specifically for coding. It's not surprising that it doesn't have some of the glyphs you need if they're not used in computer programming.

      --
      Good, inexpensive web hosting
    3. Re:non-ASCII by mcswell · · Score: 1

      Yeap, I understand: as a computational linguist I'm rare and definitely not the main target of these fontmongers. For instance, I do Python or fst programming in which I occasionally need to embed non-ASCII (and non-Latin) characters in the code, such as Bangla (Bengali) or Arabic script characters. In Python, there are ways of dealing with such characters without embedding the characters themselves (e.g. by referring to their code points)--but it's often simpler to just use the characters. For instance if I want to write out a multi-character affix it's easiest to do so using a string consisting of the characters. And in the fst programs (xfst/lexc and more recently sfst), afaik I have to write out the individual characters.

  14. Slashvertisements by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Please no more of these. I stopped going to that tech toilet Hacker News because of all the "my dumb product and how it's revolutionary" pseudo news bullshit.

  15. Re:here's your "coding" font by aix+tom · · Score: 2

    Here is "my" coding font:

    http://www.fixedsysexcelsior.c...

    That's the font that was there when I first started GW-Basic back in the days, that's the font I have kept. ;-)

  16. is it me? or... by Pharago · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...does it feel like another deja-vú

  17. Re:What is it with font developers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    ClearType makes use of the fact that a 1920x1080 color screen has 5760x1080 monochrome elements. It shows more detail. I suspect the PEBKAC.

  18. One True Font by sexconker · · Score: 1

    Fixedsys is the one true font.

  19. animated gif which shows the plagiarism by ballyhoo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This animation shows DejaVu Sans mono vs Hack.

    http://i.imgur.com/8SqL6mT.gif

    Hack is the image with the red square

    #awkward #ripoff

    1. Re:animated gif which shows the plagiarism by pz · · Score: 1

      Among the differences that the excellent animation makes clear:

      1. Lower case I (i) is made inexplicably ugly. Perhaps it helps legibility at lower rendering sizes, I'm not sure.

      2. Parentheses have been moved such that the left paren is moved a little more left, and the right paren a little more right: this gives function calls an arguably more natural look if you like space around the arguments. In particular open/close next to each other are less awkwardly placed with the new spacing.

      3. Underscore (_) has been made discontinuous, such that repeated underscores are no longer a single line. You might like this, you might not. The underscore character was originally intended to become a continuous line and used to underline letters (and by originally, I mean with typewriters and lead type).

      4. Lower case R (r) has been moved left. This makes words like "try" more evenly spaced, but screws up "stderr". You can't have everything in a monospaced font.

      5. Square brackets ([ and ]) have been moved left and right, like parentheses, for the same effect.

      A lot of people seem to be slamming it, but perhaps it isn't all that bad.

      --

      Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
    2. Re:animated gif which shows the plagiarism by leonbloy · · Score: 1

      1. Lower case I (i) is made inexplicably ugly. Perhaps it helps legibility at lower rendering sizes, I'm not sure.

      Well, for one thing, it is made more similar to the `l` (el) letter, a big step towards confusion that surely most programmers will love.

  20. elastic tabstops by GodWasAnAlien · · Score: 3, Informative

    If editors would support elastic tabstops, then we would not be limited to fixed width fonts for code.

  21. Emacs by geantvert · · Score: 1

    Looks good. I'll give it a try.

    However, the ttf version has a problem in Emacs: There is a lot of horizontal space between the characters. About 1/2 the character width.
    I do not see this problem in xterm or other applications. Also the font looks fine in the emacs font selector dialog (that's the GTK2 dialog).

    The otf version looks fine in Emacs

    1. Re:Emacs by geantvert · · Score: 1

      Also I noticed that in 11pt the 'u' is taller than other characters in emacs and in some gtk2 apps but not in xterm !!!!

    2. Re:Emacs by ksheff · · Score: 1

      What version of emacs ? I'm seeing the problem you're describing in both versions, with the otf being the worst. I'm using 24.3.1

      --
      the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
  22. So is a 1911 shotgun by laurencetux · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The point of this is being effective not pretty

  23. Re:What is it with font developers? by TeknoHog · · Score: 1

    I suspect the PEBKAC.

    I use a standing desk, you insensitive clod! I can easily demonstrate an id10t problem without the use of a chair-shaped projectile. This BEGS THE QUESTION, though, what if Mr. Ballmer had used a standing desk?

    --
    Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  24. Re:Proportional Fonts by phantomfive · · Score: 2

    Looks good to me, but I use a proportional font for coding because it's easier for me to read

    That sounds ridiculous to me, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  25. Terminus te saluto! by borgauf · · Score: 1

    . . . something, something . . . my cold, dead fingers from terminus. . . . .

  26. "Sweet Spot" of 8 to 12px? by KermodeBear · · Score: 1

    Maybe I'm just getting old, but... 8 pixels? That's incredibly small on any modern display. If you're stuck in a low-resolution environment I can see that as being a benefit, but...

    --
    Love sees no species.
  27. open old-fashioned dot-matrix fonts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html has open old-fashioned dot-matrix fonts for ASCII and Unicode. They tend to be readable in small sizes.

  28. Meh. by bobmajdakjr · · Score: 1

    I maintain it still kinda ugly. Too skinny, or something, and I very much dislike the numerals. It's ok though, I'm allowed. I just don't see why ppl keep getting so excited about it. Maybe Consolas says too much about my character.

  29. We already have the coding font by russotto · · Score: 1

    It goes by several names, including Monaco 9, fixed, and 6x13, all of which are quite similar. We don't need another.

  30. Re:Proportional Fonts by rbrander · · Score: 3, Funny

    You're far too tolerant. These "proportionalists" are the enemy of our freedoms and must all be hunted down and lynched. Even vi and emacs combatants must declare a truce and form a united front. Only monospacers are the True Faith.

  31. I want a font that looks like a VT102 looked by swb · · Score: 1

    ...on a real DEC VT102 display. A friend's dad had one and there were a few in some of the CompSci labs and I remember them being very readable, even in 132 column mode.

    I don't think it would be a question of just making a font with the same dots in the same places in a matrix. It was like the character set was designed for the way the video display would render it, providing just the right amount of phosphor blur to create good looking text. Which is probably exactly how it worked.

    Reproducing it for a modern computer would probably take having a real VT102 with a nearly new stock display and doing a lot of side by side comparisons to get it to look the same.

    I've largely given up on a custom "programmer" font and just learned to be satisfied with Lucida Console, since it works more or less on every Windows system as well as in putty sessions to non-Windows systems.

  32. Monoiod? by bigal123 · · Score: 1

    What about Monoiod? It sounds like Monoiod may be a better choice for many. Sounds like it does not have the same drawback,s.

    http://larsenwork.com/monoid/

    https://github.com/larsenwork/...

  33. Slashed O by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ø is a letter, not a number.

    1. Re:Slashed O by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It is a programmer's zero, a Danish letter, the math symbol for an empty set, the building industry symbol for diameter, the cursive version the Greek capital letter phi, the slanted version of the London Underground logo, and an emoji for the back view of a smiley with a hat. It can be whatever it wants to be.

    2. Re:Slashed O by tepples · · Score: 1

      It is a programmer's zero, a Danish letter, the math symbol for an empty set, the building industry symbol for diameter, the cursive version the Greek capital letter phi, the slanted version of the London Underground logo, and an emoji for the back view of a smiley with a hat.

      And these uses largely have distinct code points in Unicode, because they're still distinct characters with distinct uses despite looking similar. Some people prefer the dotted zero because it is visually distinct from the rest.

  34. Original Mac fonts' copyrights have expired by tepples · · Score: 2

    The article states that some countries recognize exclusive rights in typefaces for terms ranging from 14 to 25 years. Monaco and the other original Mac fonts came out in 1984.

    Digital outline fonts (.ttf, .otf) are subject to ordinary copyright as computer programs because there is more room for originality in control point placement and hint programming.

  35. You're thinking of DejaVu Mono by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

    That's because five years ago, Ubuntu was shipping with DejaVu Mono, and Hack's website admits that it's a modified DejaVu Mono.

    1. Re:You're thinking of DejaVu Mono by gfxguy · · Score: 2

      Yeah... I switched my editor to Hack and thought it didn't work at first, so I switched it to something crazy just to be sure. Sure enough, "monospace" and "hack" on Ubuntu are almost exactly the same.

      --
      Stupid sexy Flanders.
    2. Re:You're thinking of DejaVu Mono by allo · · Score: 1

      Almost all letters are the same, there are small differences for the l and spacing aroung ()

  36. Source Code Pro by djbckr · · Score: 1

    I'll just leave this here
    This is a fantastic font.

    1. Re:Source Code Pro by fnj · · Score: 1

      Here's a link that actually shows what it looks like. Looks pretty effective to me. Zero and capital oh are distinguishable. Capital eye, low case ell, and digit one are distinguishable. Quotation marks all distinguishable. Very readable.

  37. Low contrast, WTF?! by fnj · · Score: 1

    "Low contrast", WTF?! Low contrast typefaces patently suck for readability. I don't think anyone is so stupid as to believe that low contrast is good for readability, but if there is anyone that stupid, see this. There's a website you don't have to squint and strain to read.

    1. Re:Low contrast, WTF?! by frank_adrian314159 · · Score: 1

      Amen. That site nails the reason why, too - designers who value visual aesthetics over legibility.

      I understand why it happens - a contrasting font draws one's eye to the text, allowing the content, rather than the visual design to be the dominant feature on the page - and I'd imagine that's pretty hardwired into our visual perception. So the designer, knowing that he will win no design awards if the judges are distracted from the design by all of that contrasting text, chooses crappy, low-contrast designs. This is another reason why designers (UX and otherwise), in general, are a menace. They are the reason the "UX" across so many sites is sooooo wonderful.

      --
      That is all.
  38. Glass Tty VT220 or 3270font by BitwizeGHC · · Score: 1

    http://christfollower.me/misc/glasstty/

    https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font

    There, your coding-font problems are solved. You're welcome.

    For bitmap fonts also see:

    http://people.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~uwe/misc/uw-ttyp0/

    --
    N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
  39. Re:What is it with font developers? by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 1

    If antialiased text looks blurry, the resolution of your display is too low.

    Or the R/G/B interleaving on the panel differs from what the OS expects, so you need to tune it (under Windows, from the Control Panel for Cleartype).

    Or he needs glasses.

  40. Re:What is it with font developers? by sbaker · · Score: 1

    The "C" can stand for "Carpet".

    --
    www.sjbaker.org
  41. Looks fine in Visual Studio by wolffit · · Score: 1

    Hack looks just fine in Visual Studio, though some of the characters feel a bit wider than I'm accustomed to, leading to less whitespace between characters. Previously used 'Consolas'. I did have to completely restart the IDE after changing the font setting, which I did not expect.

  42. I can't take this typeface seriously by idontgno · · Score: 1

    They don't have an "lorem ipsum" sample on their webpage.

    :)

    Just kidding. It looks very nice for console use. I will probably try it out.

    --
    Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
  43. Terrible for console by chispito · · Score: 1

    I tried it in my (Windows) console and there is far too much leading. Is that the correct word? Too much vertical space. Lucida Console is worlds better for MS CLI use.

    --
    The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
  44. Too tall by EmperorOfCanada · · Score: 1

    I use Source Code Pro and when I tested hack I lost about 8 lines of code. I like to see as much of my code as possible so a taller font is not an improvement.

  45. Terminus Forever by pafein · · Score: 2

    I've been using Terminus for about a decade and you can rip it from cold, RSI'd hands.

    --
    --Pete
  46. Re:What is it with font developers? by mr_mischief · · Score: 1

    Only in PEBKAC 1.2 or newer, unless backported.