⟵ Back | 4 min · 2021-04-16 |
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
.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-> :)
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
.
(If you do want this version, you can find it in the old/
directory of
the GitHub repository.)