They do acknowledge the source of the font:

"Hack has deep roots in the libre, open source typeface community and includes the contributions of the Bitstream Vera & DejaVu projects."

It's a bit disingenuous though. I'd call Hack a straight copy of Deja Vu Sans Mono, with a few very minor tweaks. On Linux using the TTF fonts I can't even see a difference in line height:

http://i.imgur.com/wxTr0at.png

http://i.imgur.com/OO1bJFE.png

The only glyphs I can tell which are slightly different are 'i', '0' and '_'.

Adjusted and combined your examples to a gif. The one with the red square is the Hack font.

http://i.imgur.com/8SqL6mT.gif

Aside from '_', 'i', '0', many of the changes are so minuscule that it feels more like a change for the sake of change. Some however are nice, like the parenthesis placement, cleaner 'r'.

One thing I really don't like is the change to a serif-style comma. They've probably argued that it improves readability, and prefer that over typeface consistency.

They should emphasize more the previous work they are using, otherwise they might come across as ... hacks.

I'll probably stick with inconsolata though. But good job, nonetheless.

> Some however are nice, like the parenthesis placement

I see the parentheses as problematic on their own. When I read the functions that don't have any arguments, it looks like they have one space character within the parentheses!

Thanks for combining these images. The red square was really clever for peripheral vision identification of the image.

I agree with a lot of what you said here. Weirdly, they went sans-serif with the 'i' and serif with the comma. I'm personally a fan of commas, semicolons, and quotations having the same visual flavor and the Hack changes went farther from that.

I can't stand the Hack 'i'. It's awful.

To turn the conversation to a slightly different direction:

this is a great case study of the kind of effects branding can have. Dejavu sans mono, an otherwise boring and established font, especially for those using Linux, somehow just seemed something sexy and exciting because it's a newly released, specially made font called Hack, it's a font that represents a very fundamental paradigm shift in how fonts have been, the seamless legibility this font offers is unprecedented. This font is finally the one thing that will enable you to code better than you could ever before. You can't wait to try it out, can you. Go ahead, take it out for a spin. Set your terminal to use Hack, open up vim, and write up a helloworld.c program. You won't believe it -- it'll all come out beautifully and without effort, you'll find the code writing itself through you.

By "deep roots" they mean a copy-paste job with a linear transformation. LOL.

In any other medium, we might call that plagiarism.

Fortunately we can call that a fork, since they comply with the license.

https://github.com/chrissimpkins/Hack/blob/master/LICENSE.md

Copyright infringement != plagiarism. They're not violating the copyright because they abide by the terms of the license.

They're also not plagiarising because they clearly cite its original source. They even go so far as to say "deeply rooted in" which seems to me like a euphamism for "virtually identical to".

The point here isn't that it's illegal or immoral, just kind of uninteresting.

If, for example, someone repackaged a public domain font without attributing source, I wouldn't call that plagiarism either.

In my definition of plagiarism it implies unauthorized use (i.e. not complying with the license) but I guess that's open to interpretation.

So it'd still be uninteresting, unimaginative, not original work... but not plagiarism.

"," too

Latin changelog here: https://github.com/chrissimpkins/Hack/blob/master/CHANGELOG.....

"i" is different. Don't see anything else though.

Hack's "i" is not an improvement IMHO, they made it less distinctive from "l".

I feel like the tail on the i is too long.

That was the one thing that stood out for me too

Top of the lowercase 't'.

Comma and colon are also quite different.

If you look more closely you'll see that many of the glyphs are changed, most subtly. The lowercase "i" is the most significant change I saw.

There are some very minor changes, but this got me thinking about tricky fonts are compared to software development in general. You can fork a font on GitHub and make some changes, but you can't really merge them back into the original font because fonts are expected to be entirely static. Perhaps they could accept pull requests for a DejaVu 2 or something.

It doesn't work for Helvetica or Arial, but less-famous typefaces can change pretty significantly over time:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3033126/roboto-rebooted-why-goog...

Interesting. I hadn't thought of that before, but those examples seem to embody the struggle in the transition from classic print design to modern digital mediums.

I imagine someday we'll see more typefaces versioned like software, instead of alterations receiving new names. Or is this already happening?

So that's why my editor is not changed at all after using Hack, I feel guilty blaming my editor, I thought it's broken.

For the first obvious difference, watch the 'i' in 'login'.

Lowercase and i hyphen are very different. Some other characters I'd have to see better aligned to tell.

If it's not very different from DejaVu Sans mono, why not use the latter itself in the first place?