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Hack – A typeface designed for source code

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Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code

#71

Post by coldtea »

tome wrote: post #58
coldtea wrote: post #50

Earlier 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.

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?

Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code

#72

Post by coldtea »

dri_ft wrote: post #62
tome wrote: post #58

Earlier 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.

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).

Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code

#73

Post by throwanem »

coldtea wrote: post #55
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #14

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.

> 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 instal…

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.

Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code

#74

Post by tome »

coldtea wrote: post #71
tome wrote: post #58

Earlier 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.

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?

> What if there is a font named Hack and a language

Then one gets confused between them. Next month a story on HN will be titled "New version of Hack released". That's confusing.

> (which, FWIK, exists as well)?

Yes I know. That doesn't weaken my point!

> Would it hurt anyone to use context to know which of the two is talked about?

Of course. Every time one has to spend effort additionally clarifying one's meaning (or worse, someone else's meaning)causes a bit of "hurt". The more popular the project the more the hurt compounds.

A case in point: all the people on HN who click through to discussions on ML thinking it was about the language only to find it's an article about machine learning, or vice versa.

> In fact if it's "extremely common" then already there's no such concern. Now it just has N+1 uses.

I didn't mean it has N different uses as a proper name. I mean that it's a commonly used word as a non-proper-name that represents one concept or a collection of very similar concepts.

Ornithologists shouldn't call their new font "Wing" and we shouldn't call our new font "Hack". The other way round would be fine.

Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code

#75

Post by baldfat »

jcahill wrote: post #27

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

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...

Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code

#76

Post by eequah9L »

creichenbach wrote: post #23

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

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.)

Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code

#78

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

coldtea wrote: post #55
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #14

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.

> 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 instal…

UPDATE (& TL;DR & Introduction!): Killing Font Book between operations avoids all sorts of errors and weird display issues you'll get if you try to install multiple font files in a single 'session'. Open Font Book from fresh, locate font files in Finder, drag them into it and you'll do everything in one operation, and it will even update to show you what's happened!

> Like what?

Errors about duplicate fonts. Several occasions where dialogs open and close immediately, indicating some kind of problem, but not sure what. Even after going through the "yes, please do really install this font, even though there are 'duplicate fonts'", nothing seems to happen sometimes.

I've managed to install three of the fonts (font variants?) — Regular, Bold, and Bold Italic — but Italic refuses to install altogether.

> How is that in any way "horrible"?

Having to open four separate font files, then click a button each time to actually install them seems like a pretty tortuous process — I'm grateful it was only 4! It would be a LOT nicer if I could just select the files, right-click and choose "Install font(s)" and have it all done in a single step. That's totally aside from all the errors.

Having said that ... pro-tip: drag-and-drop. I always forget that drag-and-drop is sometimes the 'first class' way of doing something on OSX. So the quickest way, I think, would be:

1. Open 'Font Book' 2. Locate files in Finder 3. Drag and drop from the latter to the former

This process finally allowed the "Italic" variant to be installed. I'm assuming it will work with multiple variants at once; I would test that, but trying to remove the family/variants in Font Book just gives me a 'no-op' (after a confirmation dialog).

Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code

#79

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

throwanem wrote: post #73
coldtea wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 instal…

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 siza…

> 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.

Re: Hack – A typeface designed for source code

#80

Post by throwanem »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #79
throwanem wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 siza…

> 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.

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.
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