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Hack: A typeface designed for source code

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Re: Hack: A typeface designed for source code

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do acknowledge the source of the font: "Hack has deep roots in the libre, open source typeface community and includes the contributions of the Bitstream Vera & DejaVu projects." It's a bit disingenuous though. I'd call Hack a straight copy of Deja Vu Sans Mono, with a few very minor tweaks. On Linux using the TTF fonts I can't even see a difference in line height: http://i.imgur.com/wxTr0at.png http://i.imgur.co…

In any other medium, we might call that plagiarism.

Fortunately we can call that a fork, since they comply with the license.

https://github.com/chrissimpkins/Hack/blob/master/LICENSE.md

Re: Hack: A typeface designed for source code

#222

I use Hasklig, even though on a different language. I love having ligatures for common symbols. I should pick up fontforge again and adapt it to PHP https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig/

The use of ligatures in Hasklig is very intriguing. Would really like to see more work in this vein. Could see benefits to Clojure (arrows) and even => in JavaScript. EDIT: Looks like FiraCode has ligatures too https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

I think, you may get oddly looking code with such ligature fonts if you declare your own operators that contain ligatured pieces as parts.

For exmaple the operator >>== will probably have the first three characters joined in the ligature {>==}=

Operators ==== and (four asterisks) may look very strange too.

Re: Hack: A typeface designed for source code

#223
post #13

I desperately want to find a new code font to love but I always return to Consolas.

Here is a very different font: https://github.com/mikekchar/MUmePlusGothic

I sometimes need Japanese characters on the console, so I got in the habit of using this font. The only thing I did was return the backslash character to be an actual backslash character (rather than yen symbol, which most Japanese fonts do).

Sorry, I don't have a picture of it (and I couldn't even find a good picture because they only show Japanese characters ;-) ). It's quite a nice programmer font, but just about the opposite to Consolas. Consolas is short and wide, whereas Ume Plus is very narrow. This gives you more columns, rather than more lines. I often split my screen left and right (tests on the right hand side) and due to poor vision, I have massive fonts. This gives me a few extra columns to work with.

Re: Hack: A typeface designed for source code

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do acknowledge the source of the font: "Hack has deep roots in the libre, open source typeface community and includes the contributions of the Bitstream Vera & DejaVu projects." It's a bit disingenuous though. I'd call Hack a straight copy of Deja Vu Sans Mono, with a few very minor tweaks. On Linux using the TTF fonts I can't even see a difference in line height: http://i.imgur.com/wxTr0at.png http://i.imgur.co…

Adjusted and combined your examples to a gif. The one with the red square is the Hack font. 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…

Thanks for combining these images. The red square was really clever for peripheral vision identification of the image.

I agree with a lot of what you said here. Weirdly, they went sans-serif with the 'i' and serif with the comma. I'm personally a fan of commas, semicolons, and quotations having the same visual flavor and the Hack changes went farther from that.

Re: Hack: A typeface designed for source code

#225
We see another pushing of 'the great programming font' from time to time. But rarely see innovations like special glyphs from multi-character tokens, +=, ++, /*. We see the same, boring, single rendering glyphs for parenthesis and brackets without regard to the depth level of parenthesis. You would think a more savvy font designer could do something eliding color and font rendering to produce a font the would help quickly understand code.

Re: Hack: A typeface designed for source code

#226
I like the typeface, but I wish Hack had other weights; I find their normal weight far too heavy. I use Source Code Pro Extra Light (in Emacs and the terminal, on OS X) on my low-DPI display and it's pretty good.

Re: Hack: A typeface designed for source code

#227

We see another pushing of 'the great programming font' from time to time. But rarely see innovations like special glyphs from multi-character tokens, +=, ++, /*. We see the same, boring, single rendering glyphs for parenthesis and brackets without regard to the depth level of parenthesis. You would think a more savvy font designer could do something eliding color and font rendering to produce a font the would help qu…

Have you see FiraCode? https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

I find the idea interesting and would love to see more in this direction. It especially makes sense for languages with more obscure operators that are mimicking traditionally handwritten mathematical symbols.

That being said, I tried using FiraCode for a week and switched back. Some of the conventional common operators have become so ubiquitous and second nature to me that its difficult to adjust (especially the comparison operators). I'm still looking forward to more extended ligature fonts though.

Re: Hack: A typeface designed for source code

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my day we wrote Pascal in 9-point Geneva and we liked it! ;)

In THINK Pascal? In all those years I've never found another IDE that was as productive as this gem.

Yes! And same--the THINK IDEs spoiled me.

Re: Hack: A typeface designed for source code

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do acknowledge the source of the font: "Hack has deep roots in the libre, open source typeface community and includes the contributions of the Bitstream Vera & DejaVu projects." It's a bit disingenuous though. I'd call Hack a straight copy of Deja Vu Sans Mono, with a few very minor tweaks. On Linux using the TTF fonts I can't even see a difference in line height: http://i.imgur.com/wxTr0at.png http://i.imgur.co…

Adjusted and combined your examples to a gif. The one with the red square is the Hack font. 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…

I can't stand the Hack 'i'. It's awful.

Re: Hack: A typeface designed for source code

#230
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In any other medium, we might call that plagiarism.

Fortunately we can call that a fork, since they comply with the license. https://github.com/chrissimpkins/Hack/blob/master/LICENSE.md

Copyright infringement != plagiarism. They're not violating the copyright because they abide by the terms of the license.

They're also not plagiarising because they clearly cite its original source. They even go so far as to say "deeply rooted in" which seems to me like a euphamism for "virtually identical to".

The point here isn't that it's illegal or immoral, just kind of uninteresting.

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