8 ms·

Hack – A typeface designed for source code

174 points by rayascott 9y ago

ginreaper 9y ago
I juse assume everyone uses terminus...
jameskegel 9y ago
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.
- narrowtux 9y ago
  Not even readable on a 15" laptop screen.
  - crispyambulance 9y ago
    Well, the "specimen" link has it... https://source-foundry.github.io/Hack/font-specimen.html 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?
    - devdad 9y ago
      Right.
- Freak_NL 9y ago
  Here: http://source-foundry.github.io/Hack/font-specimen.html http://source-foundry.github.io/Hack/font-specimen.html
  - pmlnr 9y ago
    That should be the link.
  - zeveb 9y ago
    Amusingly, with JavaScript off that displays a proportional serif font! Shouldn't it be possible to download a font via CSS only?
- lucideer 9y ago
  "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 http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/playground.html
- userbinator 9y ago
  Turn off JavaScript and this page becomes less stylish, but more readable.
- enobrev 9y 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. 1: http://source-foundry.github.io/Hack/font-specimen.html http://source-foundry.github.io/Hack/font-specimen.html
  - throwanem 9y ago
    (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.
  - forgottenpass 9y ago
- Semaphor 9y ago
  It's not much better on Desktop. It just looks and feels horrible.
- zichy 9y ago
  The worst thing about the website is that there's more text in some other fonts than Hack itself.
wolfi1 9y ago
does it support ligatures? (like fira code?)
- ishtu 9y ago
  speaking of ligatures Iosevka and PragmataPro are my favorites (edit: spelling)
  - zimpenfish 9y ago
    +1 for PragmataPro (coming up on 10 years now, I think)
htmlcolor 9y ago
This is the problem that I am looking to learn. May more people share more. I will follow up on this topic <a href="http://abcdeya.com">abcya</a> http://abcdeya.com">abcya</a>
Freak_NL 9y ago
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.
- notzorbo3 9y ago
  That explains why the font looked so familiar. I've been using DejaVu Sans Mono since forever and it's great.
hollander 9y ago
What are Powerline glyphs?
- Freak_NL 9y ago
  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.
- cannam 9y ago
  I wondered that. This issue https://github.com/source-foundry/Hack/issues/1 https://github.com/source-foundry/Hack/issues/1 points to https://github.com/powerline/powerline 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.
- lucideer 9y ago
  Custom glyphs used to render bold easy-to-distinguish vim status lines or shell prompt lines to make terminal scrollback more parsable
- alvarosevilla95 9y ago
  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 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.
mmjaa 9y ago
I'm having troubles differentiating between Hack and Menlo .. is it just me or are they quite similar?
- rhblake 9y ago
  Both Hack and Menlo are based on DejaVu Sans Mono / Bitstream Vera (the DejaVu family extends Vera). Very little difference indeed.
andybak 9y ago
At first glance - lower-case l and i are too similar (at least with my eye-sight)
kowdermeister 9y ago
I'm glad they built this: http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/playground.html 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.
- zichy 9y ago
  They are missing Input (Mono): http://input.fontbureau.com/preview http://input.fontbureau.com/preview I started using it after discovering the customizer.
  - kowdermeister 9y ago
    What an awesome idea, thanks for this!
oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
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.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >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"?
  - throwanem 9y ago
    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.
    - oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
      > kill and restart Font Book Thank you! TBF to OSX, it at least says something about general reliability that I didn't even consider this would be necessary.
      - throwanem 9y ago
        Most welcome! And, yeah, it was kind of a desperation move on my part, but I've found Sierra and the 2016 15" Touch Bar model to be a major regression in that regard. Took most of a week to get external displays to work sort of reliably, and even still I get a hard lock and have to power-cycle if I incautiously plug in the displays before waking the machine.
ToFab123 9y ago
How does this compare to consolas used by Microsoft Visual Studio and others? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolas
- jhasse 9y ago
  Hack is rather different. If you're looking for a free alternative to Consolas, check out Inconsolata: http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
yummy 9y ago
This, Consolas and Noto Mono are my favourites
creichenbach 9y ago
For those feeling adventurous: Input[1] is a proportional font made for coding. It's also highly customizable. [1]: http://input.fontbureau.com http://input.fontbureau.com
- wut42 9y ago
  I've been using it since about a year -- I love it. The Serif/Sans Serif versions are also quite good.
- josteink 9y ago
  > 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 :)
- coldtea 9y ago
  Proportional coding font? For the non discerning coder?
- lucideer 9y ago
  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.
- eequah9L 9y ago
  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.)
- 0xffff2 9y ago
  It's not just proportional. I've used Input Mono as my goto text editor font for many years now.
drewsberry 9y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10140728
- throwanem 9y ago
  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.
jcahill 9y ago
Hack isn't all that great. Here are tons of alternatives: https://github.com/chrissimpkins/codeface https://github.com/chrissimpkins/codeface (Use Input)
- jhasse 9y ago
  My favorite is Inconsolata: https://github.com/chrissimpkins/codeface#inconsolata https://github.com/chrissimpkins/codeface#inconsolata
- baldfat 9y ago
  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-with-programming-ligatures https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode#fira-code-monospaced-font...
  - kevinSuttle 9y ago
    It does. We just added it. https://github.com/chrissimpkins/codeface/pull/163 https://github.com/chrissimpkins/codeface/pull/163
dna_polymerase 9y ago
I prefer Iosevka, which was trending a while ago: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka
- noir_lord 9y ago
  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).
  - masklinn 9y ago
    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).
    - noir_lord 9y ago
      Yeah iosevka is missing a few ligatures I'd like but they slowly get filled out over time and it had the ones I use the most.
  - _pmf_ 9y ago
    > 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.
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  Ditto. I love Iosevka Slab. I switch between it and VT Gothic.
- alexeiz 9y ago
  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.
ConfucianNardin 9y ago
Comparison page with quite a few programming fonts, Hack among them: http://s9w.github.io/font_compare/ http://s9w.github.io/font_compare/
- eps 9y ago
  Dina FTMFW! :)
- s9w 9y ago
  I really need to update that thing also, this is a later version: http://www.s9w.io/font_compare/ http://www.s9w.io/font_compare/
  - naikrovek 9y ago
    It's a shame that the gdipp renderer hasn't been updated in awhile. it looks so much better.
  - scentoni 9y ago
    I love this--but no Monaco?
SeanDav 9y ago
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.
houzi 9y ago
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.
- userbinator 9y ago
  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.
josteink 9y ago
I'm using this in Emacs on all the platforms I code. I love it.
tome 9y ago
Can we please stop polluting the global namespace with names like "Hack"?
- coldtea 9y ago
  Because?
  - tome 9y ago
    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.
    - dri_ft 9y ago
      These sorts of things also end up being really hard to Google when you need to look something up about them.
      - throwanem 9y ago
        There are a lot of things that have the same names as other things. Given the unaccountable absence of namespacing or package prefixing among the generally accepted set of natural human languages, a bit of disambiguation now and again is just the price we pay for using fast, fluent natural language parsers instead of writing SQL queries. In this case, Google understands "hack font" just fine.
      - coldtea 9y ago
        Never found that to be the case. "hack font" gives me just the font-related links in the front results -- same with "go language" etc. And never had an issue finding Apple or Facebook related stuff and being shown actual apples (the fruit) or Apple (the record company) or facebook (the high school thing).
    - coldtea 9y ago
      That doesn't even make sense. What if there is a font named Hack and a language (which, FWIK, exists as well)? In fact if it's "extremely common" then already there's no such concern. Now it just has N+1 uses. Would it hurt anyone to use context to know which of the two is talked about?
rbanffy 9y ago
Sorry, but nothing beats the good old IBM 3270 font. https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font
- tetraca 9y ago
  I really like this one. I might need to put this in my development VMs.
- TomMarius 9y ago
  A similar more modern font is Terminus.
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    I like the clean design of Terminus
- madmoose 9y ago
  I humbly beg to differ. This is the terminal and editor font I use: http://www.dafont.com/nouveau-ibm.font http://www.dafont.com/nouveau-ibm.font
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    Oh no! Not the MDA font! ;-)
- cat199 9y ago
  I see your mainframe and raise you a dec mini running UNIX http://www.sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/ http://www.sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/
  - cat199 9y ago
    ... 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.
andrepd 9y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10140728 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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
yoandy 9y ago
I do not get the feeling it is an improvement over other Fonts. Just another Font face.
jokoon 9y ago
No, still cannot compete with consolas, sorry!
- piahoo 9y ago
  yeah, I felt in love in incosolata instantly
Lapsa 9y ago
me... favoring Fira Code
gbrown_ 9y ago
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.
- mollusk 9y ago
  Same, slashed over dotted any day.
- jmull 9y ago
  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.
  - cat199 9y ago
    O?
Accacin 9y ago
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).
liuw 9y ago
Nothing beats good-ole 6x13 font in a terminal. :-)
- naikrovek 9y ago
  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/monoclefixed https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/517659/monoclefix...
chmike 9y ago
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.
kronos29296 9y ago
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.
rufusroflpunch 9y ago
I'm going to be honest... After a while, all of these programmer fonts start to look the same to me.
- jcadam 9y ago
  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.
  - bluejekyll 9y ago
    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).
- Raphmedia 9y ago
  They have a nice playground which lets you try different fonts. Give it a go: http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/playground.html http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/playground.html (click once on the fonts dropdown then use the down arrow to compare them quickly)
  - baldfat 9y ago
    It doesn't display ligatures.
- libeclipse 9y ago
  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.
  - dispo001 9y ago
    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.
batat 9y ago
IMO DejaVu's "i" is much better. https://i.imgur.com/1ITyRGt.gif https://i.imgur.com/1ITyRGt.gif
discreditable 9y ago
Why are these goofballs distributing Windows fonts as an EXE?
ericfrederich 9y ago
I switched my Sublime Text to it and watched my fonts change ever-so-slightly. This font is essentially "Source Code Pro"
partycoder 9y ago
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.
tempodox 9y ago
Installing these fonts makes Font Book crash on my Mac.
DonHopkins 9y ago
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/jscript/tinyalice.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20150407130603/http://mckoss.com...
- dispo001 9y ago
  Provided some conditioning, mine is actually readable :D http://synesthesia.go-here.nl http://synesthesia.go-here.nl (the obvious: 3 height allows for a lot more lines than 5)
- azeirah 9y ago
  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
  - Joeri 9y ago
    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.
    - DonHopkins 9y ago
      Extra credit if you can read that hires text on an Apple ][ color monitor (or NTSC color TV), where you get one color per two pixels, with seven pixels per byte, and some very quirky rules for figuring out the color! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_graphics#High-Resolution_.28Hi-Res.29_graphics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_graphics#High-Resolut... The Apple II's Hi-Res mode was peculiar even by the standards of the day... Each pair of adjacent pixels generated a single color pixel via artifact color, resulting in an effective resolution of 140×200. The lower seven bits of each byte represented the pixels, while the most significant bit controlled the phase offset for that block of pixels, altering the color that was displayed... Finally, another quirk of Wozniak's design is that while any pixel could be black or white, only pixels with odd X-coordinates could be green or orange. Likewise, only even-numbered pixels could be violet or blue.[4] This is where the so-called "fringe benefit" comes in. The Apple video hardware interprets a sequence of three or more turned-on horizontal pixels as solid white, while a sequence of alternating pixels would display as color. Similarly, a sequence of three or more turned-off horizontal pixels would display as black.
MarcScott 9y ago
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.
- naikrovek 9y ago
  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.
- Chattered 9y ago
  Dejavu Sans Mono. For some reason, I've typed it out in a few files, such as my Emacs init and .Xresources.
maxk42 9y ago
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.
- fancy_pantser 9y ago
  "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-myth.html 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/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4612630/

174 points by rayascott 9y ago

I juse assume everyone uses terminus...

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.

narrowtux 9y ago
Not even readable on a 15" laptop screen.
- crispyambulance 9y ago
  Well, the "specimen" link has it... https://source-foundry.github.io/Hack/font-specimen.html 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?
  - devdad 9y ago
    Right.
Freak_NL 9y ago
Here: http://source-foundry.github.io/Hack/font-specimen.html http://source-foundry.github.io/Hack/font-specimen.html
- pmlnr 9y ago
  That should be the link.
- zeveb 9y ago
  Amusingly, with JavaScript off that displays a proportional serif font! Shouldn't it be possible to download a font via CSS only?
lucideer 9y ago
"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 http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/playground.html
userbinator 9y ago
Turn off JavaScript and this page becomes less stylish, but more readable.
enobrev 9y 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. 1: http://source-foundry.github.io/Hack/font-specimen.html http://source-foundry.github.io/Hack/font-specimen.html
- throwanem 9y ago
  (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.
- forgottenpass 9y ago
Semaphor 9y ago
It's not much better on Desktop. It just looks and feels horrible.
zichy 9y ago
The worst thing about the website is that there's more text in some other fonts than Hack itself.

wolfi1 9y ago

does it support ligatures? (like fira code?)

ishtu 9y ago
speaking of ligatures Iosevka and PragmataPro are my favorites (edit: spelling)
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  +1 for PragmataPro (coming up on 10 years now, I think)

htmlcolor 9y ago

This is the problem that I am looking to learn. May more people share more. I will follow up on this topic <a href="http://abcdeya.com">abcya</a> http://abcdeya.com">abcya</a>

Freak_NL 9y ago

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.

notzorbo3 9y ago
That explains why the font looked so familiar. I've been using DejaVu Sans Mono since forever and it's great.

hollander 9y ago

What are Powerline glyphs?

Freak_NL 9y ago
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.
cannam 9y ago
I wondered that. This issue https://github.com/source-foundry/Hack/issues/1 https://github.com/source-foundry/Hack/issues/1 points to https://github.com/powerline/powerline 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.
lucideer 9y ago
Custom glyphs used to render bold easy-to-distinguish vim status lines or shell prompt lines to make terminal scrollback more parsable
alvarosevilla95 9y ago
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 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.

mmjaa 9y ago

I'm having troubles differentiating between Hack and Menlo .. is it just me or are they quite similar?

rhblake 9y ago
Both Hack and Menlo are based on DejaVu Sans Mono / Bitstream Vera (the DejaVu family extends Vera). Very little difference indeed.

andybak 9y ago

At first glance - lower-case l and i are too similar (at least with my eye-sight)

kowdermeister 9y ago

I'm glad they built this: http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/playground.html 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.

zichy 9y ago
They are missing Input (Mono): http://input.fontbureau.com/preview http://input.fontbureau.com/preview I started using it after discovering the customizer.
- kowdermeister 9y ago
  What an awesome idea, thanks for this!

oneeyedpigeon 9y ago

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.

coldtea 9y ago
>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"?
- throwanem 9y ago
  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.
  - oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
    > kill and restart Font Book Thank you! TBF to OSX, it at least says something about general reliability that I didn't even consider this would be necessary.
    - throwanem 9y ago
      Most welcome! And, yeah, it was kind of a desperation move on my part, but I've found Sierra and the 2016 15" Touch Bar model to be a major regression in that regard. Took most of a week to get external displays to work sort of reliably, and even still I get a hard lock and have to power-cycle if I incautiously plug in the displays before waking the machine.

ToFab123 9y ago

How does this compare to consolas used by Microsoft Visual Studio and others? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolas

jhasse 9y ago
Hack is rather different. If you're looking for a free alternative to Consolas, check out Inconsolata: http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html

yummy 9y ago

This, Consolas and Noto Mono are my favourites

creichenbach 9y ago

For those feeling adventurous: Input[1] is a proportional font made for coding. It's also highly customizable. [1]: http://input.fontbureau.com http://input.fontbureau.com

wut42 9y ago
I've been using it since about a year -- I love it. The Serif/Sans Serif versions are also quite good.
josteink 9y ago
> 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 :)
coldtea 9y ago
Proportional coding font? For the non discerning coder?
lucideer 9y ago
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.
eequah9L 9y ago
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.)
0xffff2 9y ago
It's not just proportional. I've used Input Mono as my goto text editor font for many years now.

drewsberry 9y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10140728

throwanem 9y ago
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.

jcahill 9y ago

Hack isn't all that great. Here are tons of alternatives: https://github.com/chrissimpkins/codeface https://github.com/chrissimpkins/codeface (Use Input)

jhasse 9y ago
My favorite is Inconsolata: https://github.com/chrissimpkins/codeface#inconsolata https://github.com/chrissimpkins/codeface#inconsolata
baldfat 9y ago
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-with-programming-ligatures https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode#fira-code-monospaced-font...
- kevinSuttle 9y ago
  It does. We just added it. https://github.com/chrissimpkins/codeface/pull/163 https://github.com/chrissimpkins/codeface/pull/163

dna_polymerase 9y ago

I prefer Iosevka, which was trending a while ago: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka

noir_lord 9y ago
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).
- masklinn 9y ago
  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).
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    Yeah iosevka is missing a few ligatures I'd like but they slowly get filled out over time and it had the ones I use the most.
- _pmf_ 9y ago
  > 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.
jstewartmobile 9y ago
Ditto. I love Iosevka Slab. I switch between it and VT Gothic.
alexeiz 9y ago
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.

ConfucianNardin 9y ago

Comparison page with quite a few programming fonts, Hack among them: http://s9w.github.io/font_compare/ http://s9w.github.io/font_compare/

eps 9y ago
Dina FTMFW! :)
s9w 9y ago
I really need to update that thing also, this is a later version: http://www.s9w.io/font_compare/ http://www.s9w.io/font_compare/
- naikrovek 9y ago
  It's a shame that the gdipp renderer hasn't been updated in awhile. it looks so much better.
- scentoni 9y ago
  I love this--but no Monaco?

SeanDav 9y ago

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.

houzi 9y ago

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.

userbinator 9y ago
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.

josteink 9y ago

I'm using this in Emacs on all the platforms I code. I love it.

tome 9y ago

Can we please stop polluting the global namespace with names like "Hack"?

coldtea 9y ago
Because?
- tome 9y ago
  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.
  - dri_ft 9y ago
    These sorts of things also end up being really hard to Google when you need to look something up about them.
    - throwanem 9y ago
      There are a lot of things that have the same names as other things. Given the unaccountable absence of namespacing or package prefixing among the generally accepted set of natural human languages, a bit of disambiguation now and again is just the price we pay for using fast, fluent natural language parsers instead of writing SQL queries. In this case, Google understands "hack font" just fine.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      Never found that to be the case. "hack font" gives me just the font-related links in the front results -- same with "go language" etc. And never had an issue finding Apple or Facebook related stuff and being shown actual apples (the fruit) or Apple (the record company) or facebook (the high school thing).
  - coldtea 9y ago
    That doesn't even make sense. What if there is a font named Hack and a language (which, FWIK, exists as well)? In fact if it's "extremely common" then already there's no such concern. Now it just has N+1 uses. Would it hurt anyone to use context to know which of the two is talked about?

rbanffy 9y ago

Sorry, but nothing beats the good old IBM 3270 font. https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font

tetraca 9y ago
I really like this one. I might need to put this in my development VMs.
TomMarius 9y ago
A similar more modern font is Terminus.
- rbanffy 9y ago
  I like the clean design of Terminus
madmoose 9y ago
I humbly beg to differ. This is the terminal and editor font I use: http://www.dafont.com/nouveau-ibm.font http://www.dafont.com/nouveau-ibm.font
- rbanffy 9y ago
  Oh no! Not the MDA font! ;-)
cat199 9y ago
I see your mainframe and raise you a dec mini running UNIX http://www.sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/ http://www.sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/
- cat199 9y ago
  ... 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.

andrepd 9y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10140728 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.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

yoandy 9y ago

I do not get the feeling it is an improvement over other Fonts. Just another Font face.

jokoon 9y ago

No, still cannot compete with consolas, sorry!

piahoo 9y ago
yeah, I felt in love in incosolata instantly

Lapsa 9y ago

me... favoring Fira Code

gbrown_ 9y ago

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.

mollusk 9y ago
Same, slashed over dotted any day.
jmull 9y ago
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.
- cat199 9y ago
  O?

Accacin 9y ago

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).

liuw 9y ago

Nothing beats good-ole 6x13 font in a terminal. :-)

naikrovek 9y ago
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/monoclefixed https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/517659/monoclefix...

chmike 9y ago

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.

kronos29296 9y ago

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.

rufusroflpunch 9y ago

I'm going to be honest... After a while, all of these programmer fonts start to look the same to me.

jcadam 9y ago
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.
- bluejekyll 9y ago
  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).
Raphmedia 9y ago
They have a nice playground which lets you try different fonts. Give it a go: http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/playground.html http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/playground.html (click once on the fonts dropdown then use the down arrow to compare them quickly)
- baldfat 9y ago
  It doesn't display ligatures.
libeclipse 9y ago
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.
- dispo001 9y ago
  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.

batat 9y ago

IMO DejaVu's "i" is much better. https://i.imgur.com/1ITyRGt.gif https://i.imgur.com/1ITyRGt.gif

discreditable 9y ago

Why are these goofballs distributing Windows fonts as an EXE?

ericfrederich 9y ago

I switched my Sublime Text to it and watched my fonts change ever-so-slightly. This font is essentially "Source Code Pro"

partycoder 9y ago

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.

tempodox 9y ago

Installing these fonts makes Font Book crash on my Mac.

DonHopkins 9y ago

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/jscript/tinyalice.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20150407130603/http://mckoss.com...

dispo001 9y ago
Provided some conditioning, mine is actually readable :D http://synesthesia.go-here.nl http://synesthesia.go-here.nl (the obvious: 3 height allows for a lot more lines than 5)
azeirah 9y ago
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
- Joeri 9y ago
  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.
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    Extra credit if you can read that hires text on an Apple ][ color monitor (or NTSC color TV), where you get one color per two pixels, with seven pixels per byte, and some very quirky rules for figuring out the color! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_graphics#High-Resolution_.28Hi-Res.29_graphics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_graphics#High-Resolut... The Apple II's Hi-Res mode was peculiar even by the standards of the day... Each pair of adjacent pixels generated a single color pixel via artifact color, resulting in an effective resolution of 140×200. The lower seven bits of each byte represented the pixels, while the most significant bit controlled the phase offset for that block of pixels, altering the color that was displayed... Finally, another quirk of Wozniak's design is that while any pixel could be black or white, only pixels with odd X-coordinates could be green or orange. Likewise, only even-numbered pixels could be violet or blue.[4] This is where the so-called "fringe benefit" comes in. The Apple video hardware interprets a sequence of three or more turned-on horizontal pixels as solid white, while a sequence of alternating pixels would display as color. Similarly, a sequence of three or more turned-off horizontal pixels would display as black.

MarcScott 9y ago

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.

naikrovek 9y ago
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.
Chattered 9y ago
Dejavu Sans Mono. For some reason, I've typed it out in a few files, such as my Emacs init and .Xresources.

maxk42 9y ago

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.

fancy_pantser 9y ago
"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-myth.html 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/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4612630/