Comment by enobrev
8 years ago
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.
(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.