This was posted to HN a couple of years ago. Has it changed since then? The discussion back then was fairly comprehensive, and most of the comments in here will likely replay the same questions (ligatures, comparison to other fonts like DejaVu sans, I vs i, etc.).
This is an infuriating experience on mobile. Show me white background and black text with your font. I'll be damned if I'm going to learn new paradigms in scrolling and waiting just to then notice I can't see anything anyway because it is a responsive 1080p screenshot of 12pt text.
I scrolled down for an example, saw the screenshot of tiny text and assumed that either I've gone blind or that screenshot is shit; I'm going with the latter. Maybe it looks better on a computer with an apple on it, but not on ubuntu / chrome.
Hack seems to be a nice font, otherwise. I don't know that I would switch to it as my primary, but I'll gladly add it to the collection of 20 or so "programming fonts" i seem to have collected over the years.
Does anyone program in <= 12pt type? I'm looking at this "specimen" link[1] and 12pt seems unnecessarily small. I can read it clearly, but I feel like I'm working harder to do so. 16pt is more my style.
(Had no trouble zooming the screenshot to legibility on an iPhone SE. What do you want to bet the site was designed in an exclusively fruit-machine shop? They're getting to be pretty crap for dev work lately, too, but that's another discussion.)
I use 9pt fonts in Emacs on my personal laptop, because otherwise I can't use my preferred layout (a maximized frame containing three vertically split windows) and fit enough code on a 13" display.
With a high-DPI display, it's workable enough - at 72dpi it'd be a disaster, as I had opportunity to discover during a brief flirtation with a netbook. Workable though it be, I'd like to find a still broadly similar font that made pairs like i/l and ./, more easily distinguishable at such small size. Hack is not that font; it appears to be a slightly modified Vera/DejaVu Sans Mono, which is no bad thing to be sure - I've used that font exclusively for many years - but hardly revolutionary.
To be clear, I'm not sure whether Hack actually is a modification of DejaVu Sans Mono, or whether it's a novel design. Doesn't change what it looks like either way. And some decisions seem much more driven by style than by usability - for example, curving the tail of the i, to match the l, would actively harm legibility compared to DejaVu Sans Mono, where l's distinctively curved tail makes it very easy to distinguish from every other glyph that consists primarily of a single vertical stroke. That's one of the two most commonly confused groups, and so I'm not really seeing a strong legibility rationale for making one of its members less distinguishable from another.
I do. But the 10-point characters in my editor are the height of the 13 pt characters on that page. For comparable readability, my 10 pt "Droid Sans Mono" is more readable than the 18 pt "Hack" on that page.
But that screenshot on the splash page is utterly unviewable, especially inappropriate given that their subtitle is "Hack is hand groomed and optically balanced to be your go-to code face."
For a minute I thought I must be getting really old, but then it became clear it's just shrunk down. Nobody uses fonts that small, right? right?
A lot of fonts feel like this. It's only once you set a whole page set in them it they start to look different especially when you do side-by-side comparisons.
Programmer fonts are even more samey as they are used at such small sizes comparatively and of course have the additional constraint of being monospaced (most of the time).
Personally with the amount of code I stare at each day even an oddly placed pixel can be annoying.
They have a nice playground which lets you try different fonts. Give it a go: http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/playground.html (click once on the fonts dropdown then use the down arrow to compare them quickly)
I know. I just use one of the available monospace fonts on whatever OS I'm using (there's always at least one). I'm just too lazy/apathetic to bother with installing one of these things.
I used to feel the same way. Then for some reason Source Code Pro caught my attention on someone else's screen. Now I set up all my Dev environments with that (plus all the fancy extras for zsh).
If your project involves picking a default likable font for others to use it makes sense.
Also, in the larger scope of things all the "good enough"'s at times add up to something awful. Had we perfected everything the bothering wouldn't exist. You would look at the font and click some button to have or have not become it part of your collection.
I was using proportional fonts for a couple weeks. A problem I ran into was that in coding styles that I typically work with, you need to align stuff with spaces to match some artifact on a previous line (e.g. an opening paren of a function call). At that point you pretty much need the space to be as wide as any non-whitespace character that might appear there, otherwise things end up looking wrong. This is what basically killed it for me. a) I don't like how it looks. And b), I don't want to have patches bounced over formatting trivia that I don't notice.
I've been using proportional for a few years now and can never go back to typewriter fonts (code just looks wrong). This looks really nice, I was looking for a proportional coding font. I'll have to give it a shot!
Too bad it doesn't include programmer ligatures, I've been looking for a proportional font that included those (I tried hacking them in myself but couldn't figure out the font hacking tool chain).
I'm not adventurous enough for proportional fonts, but the monospaced Input looks quite nice. And I'd not heard of it before. I'll definitely give it a spin.
... admittedly not great for small sizes due to the striping, but awesome for a relazing at a big giant terminal window and doing various simple things.
If you are used to DejaVu Sans Mono (or its ancestor Bitstream Vera Sans Mono), you might like Hack as well — it modifies DejaVu Sans Mono to make it even more suitable for source code and introduces a number of nicely aligned glyphs (geometric shapes, etc.) for use in terminals and status lines.
Great for both terminal emulators and code editors alike.
I use and enjoy this font. Easy and clear to read, and not having to patch the fonts for Vim Powerfline saved a little time (although nearly all patched fonts are available in the AUR).
Honest question here, does anyone else have no idea what font they are using in their text editor?
I use emacs, and don't have a clue as to what font I'm using. It's monospace, and that's about all that matters to me. As long as I can tell the difference between I, 1 and l - I really couldn't care less.
Code has to be readable. Those serifs aren't merely decoration: They're visual cues that help your eye intuitively determine which letter is intended by a given shape.
Sans fonts may look "clean" but they actually take your eye longer to read.
"So before you go around claiming that serif typefaces are easier to read than sans-serif typefaces, you might want to do a little checking around. The embarrassing truth is, there's no solid research to back up that claim."
The best thing about Iosevka is that it's configurable in so many different ways. You're not limited to a configuration that the author of the font thinks to be the best. The attention to details in Iosevka is also notable (like the alignment of special characters). Iosevka is very balanced: it looks good both in a source code editor and a terminal.
When I looked at ligatured fonts a few months back I went with Monoid instead, it fits my uses better, and I was especially attracted to the triple-equal ligature for JS contexts (in Monoid, `===` is rendered as a long ≡ making it visually very distinctive from assignment or regular equality).
Only good match is bitstream vera sans. I prefer Hack because it is lighter (cf. i) The only thing I prefer in Vera is the 0. The dot inside the zero in Hack is too big.
Which font to use depends on many factors.
First of all fonts don't look the same under various font rendering engines, and those engines have parameters leading to even more variations.
Then, your screen is another factor. With a lot of dpi (e.g: 4K or superior) you can pretty much anything you want since most fonts will look very readable.
Like what? Installed it with absolutely no problem at all in both Sierra and High Sierra (GM) -- and never had issues installing it in my older Mac OSes (or any other font -- some fonts created by amateurs --free .ttf varieties-- have broken metrics/config and you're warned about it sometimes. Other than that, absolutely zero issues).
>to be fair, the process for installing fonts on OSX is horrible anyway
It's literally double clicking on a font file and clicking "Install Font" on the preview that pops up.
UPDATE (& TL;DR & Introduction!): Killing Font Book between operations avoids all sorts of errors and weird display issues you'll get if you try to install multiple font files in a single 'session'. Open Font Book from fresh, locate font files in Finder, drag them into it and you'll do everything in one operation, and it will even update to show you what's happened!
> Like what?
Errors about duplicate fonts. Several occasions where dialogs open and close immediately, indicating some kind of problem, but not sure what. Even after going through the "yes, please do really install this font, even though there are 'duplicate fonts'", nothing seems to happen sometimes.
I've managed to install three of the fonts (font variants?) — Regular, Bold, and Bold Italic — but Italic refuses to install altogether.
> How is that in any way "horrible"?
Having to open four separate font files, then click a button each time to actually install them seems like a pretty tortuous process — I'm grateful it was only 4! It would be a LOT nicer if I could just select the files, right-click and choose "Install font(s)" and have it all done in a single step. That's totally aside from all the errors.
Having said that ... pro-tip: drag-and-drop. I always forget that drag-and-drop is sometimes the 'first class' way of doing something on OSX. So the quickest way, I think, would be:
1. Open 'Font Book'
2. Locate files in Finder
3. Drag and drop from the latter to the former
This process finally allowed the "Italic" variant to be installed. I'm assuming it will work with multiple variants at once; I would test that, but trying to remove the family/variants in Font Book just gives me a 'no-op' (after a confirmation dialog).
You never get it complaining about duplicate names that aren't, or have to kill and restart Font Book after installing each font because otherwise it will silently fail to install the next one? You never have it pick a random display for the "font problems" dialog, and then open that dialog buried under every other window on the display?
It was fine in Mavericks. In Sierra it has been a minor player among a very sizable collection of annoyances.
WOW! The website looks so shiny just for hosting a single font. Almost thought it was some website advertising Hack the language related stuff. Great web devs behind the site. Kudos to you.
Glyphs that are commonly used in status lines of terminal applications (editors, shell prompts) to delineate sections and to indicate the status of various things (e.g., the current character encoding, line-endings, git status, git branch name, etc.).
These glyphs include a number geometric shapes and symbols. By using a font that supports them with the proper metrics, the status line looks sharp and flawless.
I'm not sure about the origin, but I believe they are some glyphs originally introduced for vim's powerline (https://github.com/powerline/powerline you can see some pics there with the glyphs in use) that allow for cool looking status bars etc on the terminal.
Does anyone like the way they've done the dotted zero? I've always disliked it personally. If they offered a slashed version I would definitely try it out.
Pleasing to the eye, but too wide for my taste. I like to have divide a 1080p screen into three columns of 80 chars width, and most fonts are too wide for this.
If you're referring to a vertical 1080p screen, which is pretty common for developers, then you'd need a 4.5-pixel-wide font, which would be extremely difficult to read (5-pixel-wide + 1 border characters are probably the limits of having recognisable characters for the full ASCII range), but with it horizontal then only 8 pixels wide would be sufficient, and there are plenty of fonts in that range.
Various 8-pixel wide "VGA"/"DOS"/"IBM terminal", as well as the classic "6x13" and "7x14" fonts which are my favourites, would qualify.
I used to think that, then I saw Monaco on an old Mac at 10pt and I changed my mind.
Windows doesn't render fonts the same way so I wound up creating a near clone of Monaco @ 10pt on a Mac and called it Monocle. I fixed some things that annoyed me along the way.
Because it's a short, extremely common, word in our field. Choosing to use it will cause confusion, and it's also rather insulting to those who wanted to use it but restrained themselves for the greater good.
This was posted to HN a couple of years ago. Has it changed since then? The discussion back then was fairly comprehensive, and most of the comments in here will likely replay the same questions (ligatures, comparison to other fonts like DejaVu sans, I vs i, etc.).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10140728
Upvoted so maybe the next person will see it before lengthily replaying the DejaVu comparison like I just did.
Then again, this is probably one of those perennial sorts of topics that's just enjoyable to chew over every now and again.
This is an infuriating experience on mobile. Show me white background and black text with your font. I'll be damned if I'm going to learn new paradigms in scrolling and waiting just to then notice I can't see anything anyway because it is a responsive 1080p screenshot of 12pt text.
"Grab the carousel images and drag to the left or right to view"
Having to explain how to use your UI in your UI is always a red flag.
That said, maybe try http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/playground.html
Pretty infuriating on the desktop as well.
I scrolled down for an example, saw the screenshot of tiny text and assumed that either I've gone blind or that screenshot is shit; I'm going with the latter. Maybe it looks better on a computer with an apple on it, but not on ubuntu / chrome.
Hack seems to be a nice font, otherwise. I don't know that I would switch to it as my primary, but I'll gladly add it to the collection of 20 or so "programming fonts" i seem to have collected over the years.
Does anyone program in <= 12pt type? I'm looking at this "specimen" link[1] and 12pt seems unnecessarily small. I can read it clearly, but I feel like I'm working harder to do so. 16pt is more my style.
1: http://source-foundry.github.io/Hack/font-specimen.html
(Had no trouble zooming the screenshot to legibility on an iPhone SE. What do you want to bet the site was designed in an exclusively fruit-machine shop? They're getting to be pretty crap for dev work lately, too, but that's another discussion.)
I use 9pt fonts in Emacs on my personal laptop, because otherwise I can't use my preferred layout (a maximized frame containing three vertically split windows) and fit enough code on a 13" display.
With a high-DPI display, it's workable enough - at 72dpi it'd be a disaster, as I had opportunity to discover during a brief flirtation with a netbook. Workable though it be, I'd like to find a still broadly similar font that made pairs like i/l and ./, more easily distinguishable at such small size. Hack is not that font; it appears to be a slightly modified Vera/DejaVu Sans Mono, which is no bad thing to be sure - I've used that font exclusively for many years - but hardly revolutionary.
To be clear, I'm not sure whether Hack actually is a modification of DejaVu Sans Mono, or whether it's a novel design. Doesn't change what it looks like either way. And some decisions seem much more driven by style than by usability - for example, curving the tail of the i, to match the l, would actively harm legibility compared to DejaVu Sans Mono, where l's distinctively curved tail makes it very easy to distinguish from every other glyph that consists primarily of a single vertical stroke. That's one of the two most commonly confused groups, and so I'm not really seeing a strong legibility rationale for making one of its members less distinguishable from another.
Does anyone program in <= 12pt type?
I do. But the 10-point characters in my editor are the height of the 13 pt characters on that page. For comparable readability, my 10 pt "Droid Sans Mono" is more readable than the 18 pt "Hack" on that page.
Here: http://source-foundry.github.io/Hack/font-specimen.html
Amusingly, with JavaScript off that displays a proportional serif font!
Shouldn't it be possible to download a font via CSS only?
That should be the link.
The worst thing about the website is that there's more text in some other fonts than Hack itself.
Not even readable on a 15" laptop screen.
Well, the "specimen" link has it... https://source-foundry.github.io/Hack/font-specimen.html
But that screenshot on the splash page is utterly unviewable, especially inappropriate given that their subtitle is "Hack is hand groomed and optically balanced to be your go-to code face."
For a minute I thought I must be getting really old, but then it became clear it's just shrunk down. Nobody uses fonts that small, right? right?
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Turn off JavaScript and this page becomes less stylish, but more readable.
It's not much better on Desktop. It just looks and feels horrible.
I'm going to be honest... After a while, all of these programmer fonts start to look the same to me.
A lot of fonts feel like this. It's only once you set a whole page set in them it they start to look different especially when you do side-by-side comparisons.
Programmer fonts are even more samey as they are used at such small sizes comparatively and of course have the additional constraint of being monospaced (most of the time).
Personally with the amount of code I stare at each day even an oddly placed pixel can be annoying.
They have a nice playground which lets you try different fonts. Give it a go: http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/playground.html (click once on the fonts dropdown then use the down arrow to compare them quickly)
It doesn't display ligatures.
I know. I just use one of the available monospace fonts on whatever OS I'm using (there's always at least one). I'm just too lazy/apathetic to bother with installing one of these things.
I used to feel the same way. Then for some reason Source Code Pro caught my attention on someone else's screen. Now I set up all my Dev environments with that (plus all the fancy extras for zsh).
Yeah like, why bother stressing over the exact configuration of pixels that you're using to make your i's tail.
Just pick a monospaced font that you can read and get to making something worthwhile.
If your project involves picking a default likable font for others to use it makes sense.
Also, in the larger scope of things all the "good enough"'s at times add up to something awful. Had we perfected everything the bothering wouldn't exist. You would look at the font and click some button to have or have not become it part of your collection.
For those feeling adventurous: Input[1] is a proportional font made for coding. It's also highly customizable.
[1]: http://input.fontbureau.com
I was using proportional fonts for a couple weeks. A problem I ran into was that in coding styles that I typically work with, you need to align stuff with spaces to match some artifact on a previous line (e.g. an opening paren of a function call). At that point you pretty much need the space to be as wide as any non-whitespace character that might appear there, otherwise things end up looking wrong. This is what basically killed it for me. a) I don't like how it looks. And b), I don't want to have patches bounced over formatting trivia that I don't notice.
(Edit: typos.)
It's not just proportional. I've used Input Mono as my goto text editor font for many years now.
I've been using proportional for a few years now and can never go back to typewriter fonts (code just looks wrong). This looks really nice, I was looking for a proportional coding font. I'll have to give it a shot!
Too bad it doesn't include programmer ligatures, I've been looking for a proportional font that included those (I tried hacking them in myself but couldn't figure out the font hacking tool chain).
> For those feeling adventurous: Input[1] is a proportional font made for coding
I consider myself fairly adventurous, but this is clearly beyond my comfort zone :)
Thank you for this!
I'm not adventurous enough for proportional fonts, but the monospaced Input looks quite nice. And I'd not heard of it before. I'll definitely give it a spin.
Proportional coding font? For the non discerning coder?
I've been using it since about a year -- I love it. The Serif/Sans Serif versions are also quite good.
Sorry, but nothing beats the good old IBM 3270 font.
https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font
I humbly beg to differ. This is the terminal and editor font I use: http://www.dafont.com/nouveau-ibm.font
Oh no! Not the MDA font! ;-)
I see your mainframe and raise you a dec mini running UNIX
http://www.sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/
... admittedly not great for small sizes due to the striping, but awesome for a relazing at a big giant terminal window and doing various simple things.
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I really like this one. I might need to put this in my development VMs.
A similar more modern font is Terminus.
I like the clean design of Terminus
Comparison page with quite a few programming fonts, Hack among them: http://s9w.github.io/font_compare/
I really need to update that thing
also, this is a later version: http://www.s9w.io/font_compare/
It's a shame that the gdipp renderer hasn't been updated in awhile. it looks so much better.
I love this--but no Monaco?
Dina FTMFW! :)
If you are used to DejaVu Sans Mono (or its ancestor Bitstream Vera Sans Mono), you might like Hack as well — it modifies DejaVu Sans Mono to make it even more suitable for source code and introduces a number of nicely aligned glyphs (geometric shapes, etc.) for use in terminals and status lines.
Great for both terminal emulators and code editors alike.
That explains why the font looked so familiar. I've been using DejaVu Sans Mono since forever and it's great.
Real programmers use a 3x5 pixel font, to get the most code on the screen as possible!
https://web.archive.org/web/20150407130603/http://mckoss.com...
Provided some conditioning, mine is actually readable :D
http://synesthesia.go-here.nl
(the obvious: 3 height allows for a lot more lines than 5)
Viewing that story on a 2560x1440 screen is... yeah
I mean I'm young, but my eyes can't do that. I don't know anyone who can :x
On a 12 inch apple II monitor that font displayed at 28 dpi, so you have to zoom in 3 to 4 times to see it in the size it was designed for.
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Hack isn't all that great. Here are tons of alternatives:
https://github.com/chrissimpkins/codeface
(Use Input)
My favorite is Inconsolata: https://github.com/chrissimpkins/codeface#inconsolata
WHY does codeface not show ligatures? They only have them in the mono space example?
Hack is my second favorite, but just the last year I switched to Fira Code: monospaced font with programming ligatures.
I like the zero being a slash as opposed to a dot but the rest is spot on for me.
https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode#fira-code-monospaced-font...
It does. We just added it. https://github.com/chrissimpkins/codeface/pull/163
Lower case "i" and "l" are just way to similar. In addition lower case "i" looks a lot like a "t" to me. This is not a good sign for a coding font.
I use and enjoy this font. Easy and clear to read, and not having to patch the fonts for Vim Powerfline saved a little time (although nearly all patched fonts are available in the AUR).
Honest question here, does anyone else have no idea what font they are using in their text editor?
I use emacs, and don't have a clue as to what font I'm using. It's monospace, and that's about all that matters to me. As long as I can tell the difference between I, 1 and l - I really couldn't care less.
Yeah, lots of people don't know or care. As long as it shows them what they need to see, they don't care, and that's 100% fine.
Dejavu Sans Mono.
For some reason, I've typed it out in a few files, such as my Emacs init and .Xresources.
Stop making sans serif fonts for code!
Code has to be readable. Those serifs aren't merely decoration: They're visual cues that help your eye intuitively determine which letter is intended by a given shape.
Sans fonts may look "clean" but they actually take your eye longer to read.
"So before you go around claiming that serif typefaces are easier to read than sans-serif typefaces, you might want to do a little checking around. The embarrassing truth is, there's no solid research to back up that claim."
Source with references: http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-serif-readability...
One of many studies that show it's actually additional spacing that's at work when small text readability is improved with serifs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4612630/
I'm glad they built this: http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/playground.html
(click side-by-side to compare)
I think I'll switch to Fira Mono, Hack line height seems to be to condensed.
They are missing Input (Mono): http://input.fontbureau.com/preview
I started using it after discovering the customizer.
What an awesome idea, thanks for this!
I prefer Iosevka, which was trending a while ago: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka
The best thing about Iosevka is that it's configurable in so many different ways. You're not limited to a configuration that the author of the font thinks to be the best. The attention to details in Iosevka is also notable (like the alignment of special characters). Iosevka is very balanced: it looks good both in a source code editor and a terminal.
I have my own build of iosevka with my name in it.
I've yet to find a better condensed programming font with ligatures, it's close to perfect already (for me).
When I looked at ligatured fonts a few months back I went with Monoid instead, it fits my uses better, and I was especially attracted to the triple-equal ligature for JS contexts (in Monoid, `===` is rendered as a long ≡ making it visually very distinctive from assignment or regular equality).
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> I've yet to find a better condensed programming font with ligatures, it's close to perfect already (for me).
Agreed. It's narrow, but does not sacrifice readability.
Ditto. I love Iosevka Slab. I switch between it and VT Gothic.
Only good match is bitstream vera sans. I prefer Hack because it is lighter (cf. i) The only thing I prefer in Vera is the 0. The dot inside the zero in Hack is too big.
IMO DejaVu's "i" is much better.
https://i.imgur.com/1ITyRGt.gif
I switched my Sublime Text to it and watched my fonts change ever-so-slightly. This font is essentially "Source Code Pro"
Which font to use depends on many factors. First of all fonts don't look the same under various font rendering engines, and those engines have parameters leading to even more variations.
Then, your screen is another factor. With a lot of dpi (e.g: 4K or superior) you can pretty much anything you want since most fonts will look very readable.
All sorts of problems installing this on OSX; to be fair, the process for installing fonts on OSX is horrible anyway, but there are still errors.
Edit: I don't know why this got downvoted; if there's a way in which you want me to alter it to be more acceptable, please let me know.
>All sorts of problems installing this on OSX
Like what? Installed it with absolutely no problem at all in both Sierra and High Sierra (GM) -- and never had issues installing it in my older Mac OSes (or any other font -- some fonts created by amateurs --free .ttf varieties-- have broken metrics/config and you're warned about it sometimes. Other than that, absolutely zero issues).
>to be fair, the process for installing fonts on OSX is horrible anyway
It's literally double clicking on a font file and clicking "Install Font" on the preview that pops up.
How is that in any way "horrible"?
UPDATE (& TL;DR & Introduction!): Killing Font Book between operations avoids all sorts of errors and weird display issues you'll get if you try to install multiple font files in a single 'session'. Open Font Book from fresh, locate font files in Finder, drag them into it and you'll do everything in one operation, and it will even update to show you what's happened!
> Like what?
Errors about duplicate fonts. Several occasions where dialogs open and close immediately, indicating some kind of problem, but not sure what. Even after going through the "yes, please do really install this font, even though there are 'duplicate fonts'", nothing seems to happen sometimes.
I've managed to install three of the fonts (font variants?) — Regular, Bold, and Bold Italic — but Italic refuses to install altogether.
> How is that in any way "horrible"?
Having to open four separate font files, then click a button each time to actually install them seems like a pretty tortuous process — I'm grateful it was only 4! It would be a LOT nicer if I could just select the files, right-click and choose "Install font(s)" and have it all done in a single step. That's totally aside from all the errors.
Having said that ... pro-tip: drag-and-drop. I always forget that drag-and-drop is sometimes the 'first class' way of doing something on OSX. So the quickest way, I think, would be:
1. Open 'Font Book' 2. Locate files in Finder 3. Drag and drop from the latter to the former
This process finally allowed the "Italic" variant to be installed. I'm assuming it will work with multiple variants at once; I would test that, but trying to remove the family/variants in Font Book just gives me a 'no-op' (after a confirmation dialog).
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You never get it complaining about duplicate names that aren't, or have to kill and restart Font Book after installing each font because otherwise it will silently fail to install the next one? You never have it pick a random display for the "font problems" dialog, and then open that dialog buried under every other window on the display?
It was fine in Mavericks. In Sierra it has been a minor player among a very sizable collection of annoyances.
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`brew cask install font-hack` works great :)
I do not get the feeling it is an improvement over other Fonts. Just another Font face.
How does this compare to consolas used by Microsoft Visual Studio and others? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolas
Hack is rather different. If you're looking for a free alternative to Consolas, check out Inconsolata: http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
WOW! The website looks so shiny just for hosting a single font. Almost thought it was some website advertising Hack the language related stuff. Great web devs behind the site. Kudos to you.
What are Powerline glyphs?
I wondered that. This issue https://github.com/source-foundry/Hack/issues/1 points to https://github.com/powerline/powerline which appears to be some kind of status-line plugin thingy for Vim that uses certain glyphs for arrows and things. I haven't yet managed to find out which glyphs.
Glyphs that are commonly used in status lines of terminal applications (editors, shell prompts) to delineate sections and to indicate the status of various things (e.g., the current character encoding, line-endings, git status, git branch name, etc.).
These glyphs include a number geometric shapes and symbols. By using a font that supports them with the proper metrics, the status line looks sharp and flawless.
I'm not sure about the origin, but I believe they are some glyphs originally introduced for vim's powerline (https://github.com/powerline/powerline you can see some pics there with the glyphs in use) that allow for cool looking status bars etc on the terminal.
Custom glyphs used to render bold easy-to-distinguish vim status lines or shell prompt lines to make terminal scrollback more parsable
Does anyone like the way they've done the dotted zero? I've always disliked it personally. If they offered a slashed version I would definitely try it out.
No! It's an Abomination^TM
Keep stuff out of the middle of my zeros, please.
The circle surrounding nothing wonderfully symbolizes a subtle concept.
Drop a dot in hole and now what are you symbolizing? A nice golf shot? When you put a slash across it are you warning me away?
No, no. I prefer my voids empty, thanks very much.
O?
Same, slashed over dotted any day.
Pleasing to the eye, but too wide for my taste. I like to have divide a 1080p screen into three columns of 80 chars width, and most fonts are too wide for this.
If you're referring to a vertical 1080p screen, which is pretty common for developers, then you'd need a 4.5-pixel-wide font, which would be extremely difficult to read (5-pixel-wide + 1 border characters are probably the limits of having recognisable characters for the full ASCII range), but with it horizontal then only 8 pixels wide would be sufficient, and there are plenty of fonts in that range. Various 8-pixel wide "VGA"/"DOS"/"IBM terminal", as well as the classic "6x13" and "7x14" fonts which are my favourites, would qualify.
I'm having troubles differentiating between Hack and Menlo .. is it just me or are they quite similar?
Both Hack and Menlo are based on DejaVu Sans Mono / Bitstream Vera (the DejaVu family extends Vera). Very little difference indeed.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10140728
Tl;dr: the monospsce font seems to be (have been) an almost direct copy of DejaVu Mono. I don't know how much has changed over the last 2 years.
At first glance - lower-case l and i are too similar (at least with my eye-sight)
I'm using this in Emacs on all the platforms I code. I love it.
me... favoring Fira Code
Why are these goofballs distributing Windows fonts as an EXE?
Installing these fonts makes Font Book crash on my Mac.
Nothing beats good-ole 6x13 font in a terminal. :-)
I used to think that, then I saw Monaco on an old Mac at 10pt and I changed my mind.
Windows doesn't render fonts the same way so I wound up creating a near clone of Monaco @ 10pt on a Mac and called it Monocle. I fixed some things that annoyed me along the way.
Here's an earlier version that I used to show people: https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/517659/monoclefix...
No, still cannot compete with consolas, sorry!
yeah, I felt in love in incosolata instantly
This, Consolas and Noto Mono are my favourites
does it support ligatures? (like fira code?)
speaking of ligatures Iosevka and PragmataPro are my favorites (edit: spelling)
+1 for PragmataPro (coming up on 10 years now, I think)
I juse assume everyone uses terminus...
Can we please stop polluting the global namespace with names like "Hack"?
It's not a problem in practice. In most package managers, fonts have a common suffix or prefix anyway. In Arch Linux, Hack is "ttf-hack", for example.
It's the name of the typeface.
That's exactly what I'm objecting to.
Because?
Because it's a short, extremely common, word in our field. Choosing to use it will cause confusion, and it's also rather insulting to those who wanted to use it but restrained themselves for the greater good.
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