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).
Hack – A typeface designed for source code
61–70 of 136 posts
Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
These sorts of things also end up being really hard to Google when you need to look something up about them.
Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code
#63All 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.
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Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code
#64This 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.
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 collecti…
(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.
Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code
#65This 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.
Here: http://source-foundry.github.io/Hack/font-specimen.html
That should be the link.
Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code
#66Does 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.
Same, slashed over dotted any day.
Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code
#67This 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.
The worst thing about the website is that there's more text in some other fonts than Hack itself.
Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code
#68This 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.
Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code
#69Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
These sorts of things also end up being really hard to Google when you need to look something up about them.
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.