Hermit: a font for programmers, by a programmer

Repost from a year ago, link to existing discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6354396

Including the comment I was about to type before I realized it had already been written:

"I hate to say this, but a font by a programmer makes as much sense as a database library by a font designer. Good font design is not about calculations or following principled rules; it's about what looks good to the eye, and it takes a tremendous amount of skill and experience. And to my eye, at least, the font is incredibly difficult to read. It literally looks like a font designed by an engineer for a plotter, not something designed for the human eye or legibility. Good fonts follow intuitive rhythms, they focus on word shapes (not just letter shapes), natural curves, there's a tremendous amount of subtlety that goes into achieving a proper sense of balance between letterforms, and a lot of things are actually different between letters/curves/etc. so that they look the same to the eye in the end. Even with "utilitarian" fonts like monospace ones. "Carefully planned and calculated" is a great recipe for building a bridge, but not for building a font, unfortunately."

Is it supposed to look this bad? http://d.pr/i/XCGR

Tip for the one who created that font, display the font samples in an image or sample text immediately. All I care about is the looks. Did not immediately see where I could see an example so I just moved on to writing this feedback comment, and now I'm done with this post. Next!

The phrase "A font for programmer, by a programmer" is a disservice to the many fine folks at Adobe and elsewhere who manage to not only be type designers, but also programmers. There's a lot of code that goes into making a good font. (Little known fact: Just van Rossum, type designer and programmer, is the brother of the Python BDFL Guido van Rossum.)

All that to say, Adobe's Source Code Pro could also be called a font for programmers, by programmers.

If you are interested in seeing a long list of monospace fonts ranked by votes with samples on one page, please check out http://www.slant.co/topics/67/~what-are-the-best-programming....

Looks horrendous according to the sample images.

I find the rounded r's and n's a little bit difficult to negotiate, especially at smaller point sizes - while aesthetically pleasing, it makes the font harder to read. When I program, I want all my neurons available to coding. Also, the horizontal bar in f is on a different height than the one on the t. This makes it noisy.

Having said that, I applaud a developer committed enough to make "the perfect editor font" just as much as I applaud those who, via their config scripts and plugins, shape vim or emacs into their own perfect text editors.

Also, he managed to make his font work on WIndows. I never did it with mine (https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font)

Every time I learn about a new programmer font, I try it for a day. It makes me sad that I apparently will never find one I like better than Inconsolata.

Pages about fonts should be written in the target font. On that note, what font is the page about the font in? I wish there were a fixed-width version of that font.

I admire the effort that went into this. As anyone who ever tried creating a font knows, it's really tough putting it all together.

It's not _that_ bad at 12pt, but all that's wrong with the font really shows with smaller sizes. Stroke weights are inconsistent, eyes too small. The font was meant to be "clear, pragmatic and very readable". Right now, it's none of these.

Technical problems can be solved, and the font will look good to some. I don't like it, but that's just a matter of taste. Layman's opinion on aesthetics can only have statistical value (and it's questionable if professional's opinion should be valued more).

What really bothers me is pretentiousness of the first paragraph. Basically, "everything was meant to be great, so it is". That - along with a todo that says nothing about fixing flaws, but dreams of having cyrillic, greek, unicode - is the biggest problem of all.

Fixing that first would go a long way toward making this a newsworthy item and a font to keep an eye on.

It probably took a lot of work to do so I'm not going to bash this... But somehow I feel that the letters are not round enough for my eyes to easily flow from one letter to the other. But then again I don't have the best eyes either so hopefully it's useful to some other devs.

Thanks, it is always nice to see a monospaced font available. I especially like the light version. I also like the fact that symbols that look similar (e.g. "1lI") are very distinct from each others.

Not exactly the best name for changing the programmer stereotype...

I struggled for a long time to find a font that looks good even when it's tiny and subpixel smoothing isn't very effective. I've pretty much settled on tamsyn: http://www.fial.com/~scott/tamsyn-font/

It's not "pretty" but I find it the most useful and visually appealing. The only downside is that not everything works properly with bitmap fonts.

While I like this (for reasons that others have already mentioned), the lack of an italic version is a bit of a killer for me, along with the lack of full latin-1 support.

If you haven't seen it yet, Fantasque Sans Mono (formerly Cosmic Sans Neue) is my current favourite. It's worth checking out. http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/fantasque-sans-mono

Because to my eyes aren't trained, I really can't tell any font better than any other. I am mostly used to visual studio's default but I adopt to others equally efficiently without any real hindrance to my work.

So, anyone care to explain why a font is better than another or is it just a "feel" you get that you like one over the others?

It seems to me that he has gone to enormous lengths to use consistent pieces to make letters (as befits a programmer -- DRY design), which makes them all look very samish, hurting readability. I think a better approach would be to figure out how to make the glyphs seem more distinct without being inconsistent or ugly.

I'm using Yosemite on Mac and I'm loving the Osaka font.

Screenshot: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/sh/3a95a8a8-978a-4371-8411...

The one thing that jumped out at me is that I find the parentheses too strongly curved, so much so it may be difficult to distinguish between '(' and 'C'.

It's hard to tell because there are no 'C's in the samples; more upper case and mixed case text would be helpful.

I know that a sans-serif font looks all slick and modern, but those serifs in Courier New help your eye identify the character more readily and improve readability. Any monospace font without serifs is automatically a no-go for me when it comes to programming.

Thanks, but I will stick with Terminus Font:

http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/shots.html

First I scrolled past the Samples section and thought where can I see the font. I suggest to show a sample right at the top, there is enough space right next to the table of contents.

source code pro and Bitstream Vera Sans are my favourite

screenshot https://mediacru.sh/ce42e42abe27

Good to know the author intends to add Greek characters. Until then, for me it's a no-no :-(. Since VIM is my default editor, I need Greek chars in terminal.

Why author choose to make it look like this?

For instance, I prefer Menlo font and find it much better looking than Hermit.

I recommend PragmataPro. Once I found it, I knew I didn't have to look for another programming font again.

It has an interesting look, but it's not something I'd personally use on a daily basis.

A bit old-fashioned. Easy to read. I like it (just switched my Eclipse to it). Thanks!

I ll stick with Consolas.

Looks kind of blurry.