But, recently, I saw a post on arstechnica.com touting the coolness of Hack, an open-source monospace font marketed towards the code slingers of the world.
I undoubtedly get tired of using of the defacto DejaVu and Liberation monospace fonts and decided to give this a shot. And quite honestly, even though it's subtle, I really like it.
Characters of note: I don't notice the lowercase-L vs. the numeral 1 as much as I do the zero vs. uppercase-O and lowercase-I curvature.
Font sizes: I think my favorite font size is 9px or 11px (11px especially if I've been staring at my monitor for more than 4 hour straight with contacts in to boot!)
The overall font character scheme also seems a bit more compressed as well, which is nice so I 'feel' like I'm getting more width real-estate. Case in point: take it for what it's worth.
Even though this is a less traditional and definitely 'non-distro' way to add an overall font to your OS, I think it gives most people the flexibility enough to give it a shot themselves with as minimal overhead as possible, especially if you want it 'long-term' and want to put it in the same place as your other distro fonts via package management without creating a distro package for it.
Here's how to make the 'Hack' monospace font accessible in Spyder IDE under Fedora (or any other RHEL based OS for that matter).
If you really want to get technical and overview-ish, I guess this would be a good way to hack-and-slash 'any' font you want to Spyder, monospace or not.
Download and Unzip 'Hack' Font from SourceFoundary
Go to Hack's SourceFoundary site and download the True-Type font .zip archive.
Once you have downloaded the 'Hack' fonts, simply unzip them wherever you want:
$ cd /path/to/hack/fonts/ $ unzip Hack-v2_010-ttf.zip unzip Hack-v2_010-ttf.zip Archive: Hack-v2_010-ttf.zip inflating: Hack-Bold.ttf inflating: Hack-BoldOblique.ttf inflating: Hack-Regular.ttf inflating: Hack-RegularOblique.ttf $
Add 'Hack' font into to your OS
Adding the Hack monospace font (this way) is pretty trivial. The key point here is to know the top-level path where your Linux distro stashes it's fonts. For a font like this that I really want to use long-term, I think this is a better solution than putting it in ~/.fonts/ or equivalent. I'm also going to assume you have proper privileges to do all these command(s) or know how to obtain it (e.g. NOT prefacing the sudo command to obvious root-level stuff)
- Create a new directory for the 'Hack' font in your Linux distro's top-level system font path
$ mkdir /usr/share/fonts/hack
$ cp -a /path/to/hack/fonts/Hack-*.ttf /usr/share/fonts/hack/
$ chown -R root:root /usr/share/fonts/hack && chmod 755 /usr/share/fonts/hackChanges to Spyder IDE
I'm using Spyder IDE v2.2.4, so YMMV if you're using another version. I didn't go scout all this out, but it's pretty self-explanatory.
Spyder IDE has a default, hard-coded list of approve and available monospace fonts that are defacto standards. All you have to do is alter the list data structure defining the list of monospace fonts in spyderlib.
To do this, you'll want to look for the following line of code in /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/spyderlib/config.py module:
MONOSPACE = ['Monospace', 'DejaVu Sans Mono', 'Consolas', 'Monaco',
'Bitstream Vera Sans Mono', 'Andale Mono', 'Liberation Mono',
'Courier New', 'Courier', 'monospace', 'Fixed', 'Terminal']
...and add in the 'Hack' fonts into the MONOSPACE list structure so it looks something like this:
MONOSPACE = ['Monospace', 'DejaVu Sans Mono', 'Consolas', 'Monaco',
'Bitstream Vera Sans Mono', 'Andale Mono', 'Liberation Mono',
'Courier New', 'Courier', 'monospace', 'Fixed', 'Terminal',
'Hack-Regular', 'Hack-RegularOblique.ttf', 'Hack-Bold.ttf',
'Hack-BoldOblique.ttf']
NOTE: There are several 'config.py' modules in Spyder IDE, so if you're really confused at this point, just do a case-insensitive recursive grep (e.g. grep -i -R "MONOSPACE" /path/to/spyderide/site-package/install) and find the right one to edit.
Restart Spyder IDE and Choose 'Hack' as your Font
If you still have Spyder IDE running, close it and re-open it.
Then on Sypder's top menu bar, you'll want to navigate to 'Tools > Preferences', then select the 'Editor' option on the left-hand side. Now, if you select the 'font' drop-down menu, you should see 'Hack' available for your choosing:
You can now click 'Apply' and watch all those wonderful tabs of 'code' change over to using 'Hack'.
If you also want your Python console in Spyder to use this font as well, just select 'Console' and change it there, too.
Before-and-After of Hack vs. DejaVu Sans
Here's a couple of quick screenshots put in extra-large to show the differences of Hack vs. DejaVu Sans out-of-the-box Spyder IDE font:
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| DejaVu Sans - Normal - 9px |
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| Hack - Normal - 9px |
Now as much as I'd want to package this into an RPM for my own sake in case some update comes about, that would just be more work than it's worth.
Enjoy!
