Hack: A typeface designed for source code

this is a great case study of the kind of effects branding can have. Dejavu sans mono, an otherwise boring and established font, especially for those using Linux, somehow just seemed something sexy and exciting because it's a newly released, specially made font called Hack, it's a font that represents a very fundamental paradigm shift in how fonts have been, the seamless legibility this font offers is unprecedented. This font is finally the one thing that will enable you to code better than you could ever before. You can't wait to try it out, can you. Go ahead, take it out for a spin. Set your terminal to use Hack, open up vim, and write up a helloworld.c program. You won't believe it -- it'll all come out beautifully and without effort, you'll find the code writing itself through you.

A code written in Helvetica would render bizarro on an editor running Futura.

https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/1408

Proper font handling is actually one of the few things that I find troubling with these "old" nix tools.

The combination of nice font handling and otherwise being lightweight (and working fine without any borders, which makes sense when paired with xmonad for a window manager) was one of the reasons I moved to Sakura:

http://www.pleyades.net/david/projects/sakura

(Not on my Linux box atm - so unable to test if ligatures actually work -- but either way it would appear vim does a little too much -- so even if the terminal handles ligatures, vim will not. Time to upgrade to ed! ;-)

I wonder if kakoune[1] supports ligatures in a capabable terminal? I'm guessing not, but have yet to try.

Also, I just discovered that AbiWord actually have a setting to get vi(m) keybindings -- not that I'd suggest moving from vim to abiword for editing code...:

http://www.abisource.com/wiki/Keyboard_bindings

Based on the issue[2] for Emacs support, it looks like the general "easy" approach is monkey-patching from two-symbols to unicode ligatures and back on the fly. Such an approach would probably work with vim too -- it'd probably be just as well to handle that bit via a pre/post processor -- and just type in the combined symbols directly in vim (eg: iab >= ≥ to insert the symbol for "greather-then" rather than >= -- and then just deal with editing that as a single symbol. You'd need to run the source through a transformation to change all occurrences back -- for most langauges -- so I'm not sure if it's really a good idea. But seems simpler if you just want ligatures, and there's a unicode glyph that matches the ligatures you want.

Ahem, well -- from the Haskling site: "Some Haskellers have resorted to Unicode symbols (⇒, ← etc.), which are valid in the ghc. However they are one-character-wide and therefore eye-strainingly small. Furthermore, when displayed as substitutes to the underlying multi-character representation, as vim2hs does, the characters go out of alignment."

So then again, maybe not. I suppose we just have to wait for the next display server tech to reinvent display PostScript along with a friendly API ...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9764028

[2] See gist linked from issue: https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig/issues/10

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

Aside from '_', 'i', '0', many of the changes are so minuscule that it feels more like a change for the sake of change. Some however are nice, like the parenthesis placement, cleaner 'r'.

One thing I really don't like is the change to a serif-style comma. They've probably argued that it improves readability, and prefer that over typeface consistency.

They should emphasize more the previous work they are using, otherwise they might come across as ... hacks.

I'll probably stick with inconsolata though. But good job, nonetheless.

Don't be so sure of that. If you were to load any of my code in your favorite editor and font, you would never know that I wrote it in a proportional font or what font I used. It would just look like ordinary well-formatted code.

The reason is simple: I don't use column alignment at all. Column alignment is the only reason that code formatting would ever depend on what font you use or whether it's a monospaced or proportional font.

Without column alignment, it doesn't matter in the slightest what font you write the code in or what font you read it in. Proportional, monospaced, any font you like. It will look fine.