Hack – A typeface designed for source code

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?

Shouldn't it be possible to download a font via CSS only?

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.

I do. But the 10-point characters in my editor are the height of the 13 pt characters on that page. For comparable readability, my 10 pt "Droid Sans Mono" is more readable than the 18 pt "Hack" on that page.

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.

Agreed. It's narrow, but does not sacrifice readability.

It was fine in Mavericks. In Sierra it has been a minor player among a very sizable collection of annoyances.

> 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).