What is the best alternative to Bitstream DejaVu?

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score 67 · Answer 1

Google Noto

Top Pro

Optimized for a large variety of displays

Glyph design on Noto Sans is well designed and accounts for HiDPI and standard displays. See More

Top Con

Font pack might be too large

Because it is so comprehensive, the TTF/OTF packages in ZIP is really large. See More

Top Pro

Open-source

Licensed and distributed under the SIL Open Font License. See More

Top Pro

Retina-ready

Looks very clean and crisp on retina displays. See More

Top Pro

Simple and yet beautiful

Simple and beautiful - much like the Windows counterparts such as Calibri and Arial but it's native for Linux and for this reason it looks better than these two with anti-aliasing. See More

Top Pro

Expansive character set

Noto Sans is one of the most comprehensive fonts in the market, covering an estimated 30+ languages backed by Google. See More

Specs

License:OFL-1.1

Based On:Google Droid Sans

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67 6

score 23 · Answer 2

Microsoft Verdana

Top Con

Not monospaced

-if that is an absolute must for you. But don't assume it is until you've tried without... See More

Top Pro

Free with Windows

Top Pro

Compact while light

Packs lots of information into your screen space while remaining clear and never looking crowded. See More

Top Pro

Renders perfectly at all sizes

Again, particularly in Windows See More

Top Pro

Looks absolutely gorgeous in Windows

Looks good elsewhere as well, but the world-class hinting here really comes out with the windows rasterizer (probably optimized for it). See More

Specs

License:Proprietary

23 3

score 1121 · Answer 3

Fira Code

Top Pro

Has ligatures

This is particularly beneficial for those who wish to use combined letters such as "æ" and other diphthongs. But when it comes to programming, the ability to scan through your code is improved with ligatures for equality, arrow functions, and more. See More

Top Con

The '@' Symbol is asymmetric

It's a style, but it would be nice if it would wrap and not just cover the top. See More

Top Pro

Supports retina displays

Fira Coda supports high pixel density retina displays. See More

Top Con

No true italic

Italic is just a slanted original, an Oblique. Looks ugly and is difficult on the eyes. See More

Top Pro

Characters look really nice

Some characters that look odd in other monospace fonts look very nice in Fira Code: @, a, 1, lower-case-L, Q, j, * See More

Top Con

Noisy serif-like style harming the text clarity

Top Pro

Good editor support

A list of supported editors and terminals can be found here. See More

Top Con

Ligatures are nice-looking but harm clarity

Even though the font combines characters into ligatures, you still need to type the normal characters, and the ligatures make that difficult in many cases. See More

Top Pro

Has a slashed zero

New style since February 2018. See More

Top Con

Ligatures like == and === are harder to tell apart than they should be

Top Pro

Frequent updates

The repository is frequently updated. See More

Top Con

Too wide, too large line height

Top Pro

Installs easily on Mac

Many ligature fonts on Github aren't "mac ready". This font comes pre-compiled and ready to install on Windows, Mac, and Linux. See More

Top Con

Too wide

Much wider than other fonts. See More

Top Con

Ligatures lump some characters together and make them hard to read

Top Con

Needs support for ligatures

It can't work in plain terminal, must have built in support for ligatures in editor. See More

Top Con

No Sublime Text support

Not the font's fault but even the latest Sublime Text builds (e.g. 3126) don't support ligatures. See More

Top Con

Ligatures break correlation between symbols on screen and the number of characters

This makes it easier to lose the grasp how long lines actually are. See More

Top Con

Curly braces are not clear enough

Curly braches ("{" and "}") are not clear enough. They are too horizontally narrow, making them look almost like pipes ("|"). See More

Top Con

Bad 4 and r characters, dotted 0

WHY is r a serif? See More

Top Con

Cannot enable alternative stylistic styles on Xcode

I've tried enabling some of the alternate stylistic styles using Xcode's Font picker, via the "Typography" screen. None of the stylistic styles I enable get reflected in Xcode's code editor, even if I restart Xcode from scratch. I'm not sure whether this is a limitation of Xcode, or of the font itself. See More

Specs

License:OFL-1.1

Based On:Mozilla Fira Mono

Italics:Yes

Weights:6 (Light, Regular, Retina, Medium, Semibold, Bold)

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