romeovs / Creep

Features · Installation · Attribution · Licence

I never found the pixel font that was perfect for me, so I decided to roll my own with creep. It is a pretty compact (only 4px wide!) font that's great for smaller screens (like my 11" laptop).

I'm constantly adding in new characters (diacritics, box-drawing characters, etc.), so I figured I'd put it up on github for poeple to reap benefits of this.

I also recently added some nice Haskell features (that can be used in other languages too)!

Features

Box Drawing · Sparklines · Haskell · Braille and Drawille

Box drawing

Creep has most of the basic box drawing characters implemented. Therefore creep usually works with most ncurses-type programs or with tmux window-splitting for example.

Powerline

Creep supports all the symbols needed for Lokaltog's awesome powerline plugin for vim:

Sparklines

Creep has the necessary symbols for creating sparklines. This is cool for tools like rainbarf and others. I mean, see how good it makes iStats look:

Better Haskell syntax

I've added support for a better-looking Haskell syntax. Take a look at the Haskell wiki page to get an idea of how it looks and how to use it in vim.

Braille and Drawille

Creep now supports the full braille alphabet, which was an easy thing to do because of the clever braille encoding scheme. All of the braille characters are simply generated using a little script.

Because creep supports braille, it also supports the wonderful Drawille libraries:

Installation

The font is maintained using the awesome gbdfed which unfortunatly does not support a lot of export formats besides bdf.

To install creep in Mac OS X, you can use font forge to convert the bdf file to a dfont file that can be used by Font Book.app to install the font. To do this:

1. open the font in font forge:

   $ fontforge creep.bdf
   

2. select File > Generate Fonts

3. from the left dropdown select No Outline Font

4. from the right dropdown select Apple bitmap only sfnt (dfont)

5. click Save

6. open the .dfont file in Font Book.app

7. You're done!

Alternativatly you can download one of the releases, these are not the latest versions of the font but I will try to update them regulary so you don't have to go trought these steps.

I'm not a professional font creator so there are some little quirks in the character sizing. To get past these I set the line height to 0.9 and the character spacing to 0.75 in Terminal.app (using a Size of 16px) to make it look airtight.

Attribution

Before I created creep I was using Proggy Tiny, which is also great font and has given me the inspiration to create my own font.

Also I would like to compliment the creators of gbdfed on their work. I really enjoy using it.

Also if you have some ideas on what I should implement, please contact me. I'd be happy to implement extra features.

Thanks go out to Chase Colman for fixing the metric issues creep had, a wercker script and just for being a helpful fellow.

Creepin'

License

I love you all, so please use this font as much as you like for free. However, I would like to make sure you provide others the same liberty in creep's new incarnations. Therefore creep is licensed under the MIT License.