

Hermit: a font for programmers, by a programmer - zdw
https://pcaro.es/p/hermit/

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

~~~
a-nikolaev
Just curious, what would you say about this font sample:
[http://i.imgur.com/DSXqMCZ.png](http://i.imgur.com/DSXqMCZ.png) ? (It's a
modification of Terminus, with smaller letter height to have a bit more
whitespace between the lines)

~~~
aeflash
Individual characters can be made out, but words are hard to read. Not enough
separation between letters and symbols, so constructs like "(pred=%i)\t" are
harder to visually parse. I'm also not a fan of aliased pixel fonts -- it
really exacerbates the picket-fence effect while reading.

Here's what your code sample looks like in Source Code Pro:

[http://i.imgur.com/uAknyGB.png](http://i.imgur.com/uAknyGB.png)

Smaller font:

[http://i.imgur.com/m0p17tm.png](http://i.imgur.com/m0p17tm.png)

Notice how all letters take up the full horizontal width so words clump
together. It's easy to see that a space is a space, and not just an "i" next
to an "l"

It's also worth noting that I had to try 3 separate OCR processors with your
sample before I got one that didn't output complete garbage.

~~~
a-nikolaev
Thanks for such a great analysis! You pointed out some things I did not really
think about. Especially the way Source Code Pro handles "i"s and "l"s.

I will try to add 1px of horizontal space between letters. The goal was to
make the font vertically compact, but still legible. The size is small and it
feels quite clumped though.

------
OutThisLife
Is it supposed to look this bad? [http://d.pr/i/XCGR](http://d.pr/i/XCGR)

~~~
atmosx
Please, use
[http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html](http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html)

my eyes hurt :-)

------
hkon
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!

~~~
klodolph
You literally have to scroll down to the "Samples" section to see font
samples. Then you come in the comments to tell everyone how lazy you are.

~~~
ctdonath
No, you literally have to scroll down to the "below-the-fold" Samples section,
read the terse description, and click in and out of several links to see
samples.

Point is: the very first thing anyone going to that page to see that font is
going to want to see is _that font_. Most are going to expect the text of the
page in that font, or at least a suitable sample _first_. As is, the text seen
is in some non-standard (AFAIK) font which piques interest as the reader
studies its subtleties, wondering how code would look in it ... then after a
nontrivial time reading, discovered the links to samples, and is startled to
see something completely different (and, IMHO, kinda "squashed").

A newspaper doesn't put the #1 headline on a page referenced below-the-fold.

~~~
deneca
I see this issue a lot when people try to show off their projects. "Check out
my new gui/platform/product/application/plugin - If you are interesting in
seeing it visually, simply fork my repo, step through the install, and get it
running locally."

------
dangayle
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.

------
falsedan
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...](http://www.slant.co/topics/67/~what-are-the-best-programming-
fonts).

------
jsd1982
Looks horrendous according to the sample images.

~~~
astrodust
Sample images should be the _first_ thing you show when talking about a font.
Instead it's just text?

------
rbanffy
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](https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font))

~~~
floatboth
I don't think the r in this typeface is aesthetically pleasing :(

------
jarin
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.

~~~
rolfvandekrol
I had the same thing, until I found Source Code Pro from Adobe.
[https://github.com/adobe/source-code-pro](https://github.com/adobe/source-
code-pro)

Yes, that's right. An open source font by Adobe. It's absolutely gorgeous!

~~~
floatboth
I switched to Fira Mono from Mozilla. It's kinda similar, and I like Source
Code Pro too, but I like Fira Mono a bit more :-)

------
elsavier
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.

------
rdvrk
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.

------
bubblicious
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.

------
ICWiener
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.

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

------
Tiksi
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/](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.

------
jdpage
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](http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/fantasque-sans-mono)

------
bagosm
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?

~~~
Raphmedia
Easy to read at small sizes so you can have a lot of code. 1 and i are not
similar. 0 and O are different. Looks good as white on black (or bright on
black anyway). Spacing between the letters is correct for use in code. Etc.

------
Tloewald
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.

------
magerleagues
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...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/sh/3a95a8a8-978a-4371-8411-5a4044ce071b/d00f2e11db79f6940b148e0df3717845)

~~~
OutThisLife
That font size is so big! Am I alone w/ preferring 9pt
[http://d.pr/i/NDUU](http://d.pr/i/NDUU)?

~~~
bithush
Nice theme. You mind sharing?

~~~
OutThisLife
Sure.

[https://github.com/daylerees/colour-
schemes](https://github.com/daylerees/colour-schemes) it's "Frontier Contrast"

------
_kst_
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.

------
maxk42
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.

------
turrini
Thanks, but I will stick with Terminus Font:

[http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/shots.html](http://terminus-
font.sourceforge.net/shots.html)

~~~
vorporeal
Same, I use Terminus at 8pt as my terminal font, and it's fantastic - dense
yet readable.

------
yaph
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.

------
alokyadav15
source code pro and Bitstream Vera Sans are my favourite

screenshot
[https://mediacru.sh/ce42e42abe27](https://mediacru.sh/ce42e42abe27)

------
atmosx
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.

------
vmiroshnikov
Why author choose to make it look like this?

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

~~~
itistoday2
Menlo is my favorite too. :)

Tried others (including this one), but keep coming back to it. I have it set
to 14pt in Sublime Text.

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

~~~
sj4nz
For those looking...
[http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragmatapro.htm](http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragmatapro.htm)

------
qq66
It has an interesting look, but it's not something I'd personally use on a
daily basis.

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

------
gizmodo59
I ll stick with Consolas.

------
Timmmmbob
Looks kind of blurry.

