⟵ Back 4 min · 2021-04-16

cursed_font

cursed_font is a 9x18 bitmapped font designed for low-DPI screens. It was originally an embiggened and monospace-ified version of Apple's Chicago font from System 6, but it also takes inspiration from many other fonts such as bizcat, ttyp0, tamzen, scientifica.


demo

One novel aspect of cursed_font is the relatively short descenders and ascenders. Unlike most other fonts, glyphs with an ascending stem are not as tall as uppercase glyphs. Even more unusual is the lowercase t glyph, which doesn't have an ascender at all, after the Carolingian fashion. Additionally, since the dotted glyphs for i and j are obviously inferior to the undotted variants, those are used instead.

This was done mainly to ensure that any shoulder surfers would be mentally traumatised for life.


zF code Yeß?

cursed_font was designed to be thick and with a goal of being easy to read on poor monitors with minimal eye strain. Whether that goal has been reached is a matter of debate, as the author is nowhere near being a competent font designer.

Large brackets charmap
__LINE__

cursed_font was also designed with viewing source code in mind. Parenthesis, brackets, and curly brackets all ascend and descend below the normal boundaries of a glyph, and the sigils for the tilde ~ and the asterisk * are centered instead of being raised. The underscore is placed on the baseline of the font, instead of under it (seriously, who uses the underscore character to actually underline text anymore?) and it extends to the edges, much like a box-drawing character.


rm -rf / --no-preserve-root math

icons

Glyphs have been added only for some of the more common mathematical symbols, but more glyphs will be added in future versions. A large number of icons have been added for use in status bars and other applications. A few glyphs have been added specifically for ligatures (ie [[ and ]]), but only a few. More will be added soon.


screenshot

Download

You can get cursed_font on GitHub. Download a tarball from the releases, extract, and copy the font.bdf file to someplace like /usr/share/fonts. Run fc-cache -f -v and you're done.

License

This font and other non-code content (i.e. screenshots) are licensed under CC-BY v4.0. You are free to do pretty much anything with this font as long as you attribute me.

Feedback

Kindly send feedback, hate mail, and other cursed_font-related bikeshedding to the author's email at a2llZHRsIO+8oCB0aWxkZSBbZG90XSB0ZWFtCg==, or /msg cot on libera.chat. Any advice on improving the glyphs in this font would be greatly appreciated.

Testimonials

As a fellow horrible-sight-having person, I appreciate your work.
<skuzzymiglet> and does your desktop look like that? like, it looks
               super dylanaraps-ey
 <kiedtl> I think I'm more-or-less done with this font, except for
          some powerline glyphs & accented characters maybe
 <kiedtl> any feedback/advice would be appreciated, I'm not a
          talented font designer :^)
<meff-m-> kiedtl: oh no that picture looks a bit cursed
 <kiedtl> meff-m-: the cursed font. I like it.
<meff-m-> :)

screenshot


Below is an old screenshot that you can laugh at, showing a previous version of cursed_font, back when it was just an upscaled version of Chicago.


old screenshot

(If you do want this version, you can find it in the old/ directory of the GitHub repository.)



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