hzeep

hzeep is a (slightly) modified version of the Neep font by Jim Knoble. hzeep is designed for living in the terminal. In my experience, it works well for programming, as well as for other tasks like reading email.

Modifications to the original font were made using FontForge, and the TTF version of the font was created with help from this script. You can see the specifics of the changes from Neep a little farther down the page.

You can get a sense of how the font looks with the following two images:

download

hzeep is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3.0. You can download the current version (version 3, released 9 Aug 2022) below:

• hzeep Version 3, TTF
• hzeep Version 3, 8x15 BDF
• hzeep Source file (FontForge sfd)

install

On GNU/Linux Systems, download the TTF file and put it in your ~/.fonts directory, and then run:

$ fc-cache -vf

for best results

• Use font size 11 (to avoid issues with blurriness from scaling and AA)
• Use the bold version if you are far away from the screen or are otherwise put off by the thin lines

alternatives

what changed?

Version 3

When using the bold version of the font, it was difficult to tell the exclamation point apart from the solid pipe character; so I modified both the exclamation point and the question mark to have more space between the two components. A comparison is shown below, with the original (version 2) on top, and the updated glyphs (version 3) on the bottom:

Version 2

After receiving feedback that the '6' and '8' glyphs were difficult to tell apart at a distance, I modified the '6' and '9' glyphs to try to improve this. A comparison is shown below, with the original (version 1) on top, and the updated glyphs (version 2) on the bottom:

Version 2 is available here:
hzeep Version 2, TTF
hzeep Version 2, 8x15 BDF

Version 1

Really, version 1 is almost entirely still Neep. The following is (I think) an exhaustive list of changes I made, starting with the neep-iso8859-1-08x15.bdf file from this tarball. For some of the changes, a comparison is shown, with Neep on top on hzeep on bottom.

• Thinned the following characters by removing a small number of pixels: @, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, A, B, C, G, J, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, U, a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, j, l, n, o, p, q, s, t, u, y.
  
• Redrew the k, v, V, x, X, and Y characters.
  
• Thinned the backtick, comma, semicolon, colon, and period.
  
• Changed the counters of the g, q and p characters to match the counters of d and b in height.
  
• Redrew the ampersand character.
  
• Redrew the question mark character.
  
• Adjusted the height of the colon, semicolon, and pipe (|) characters.

Version 1 is only available as a bitmap font:
hzeep Version 1, 8x15 BDF