What are the best fonts to use in a terminal emulator?

Weights:7 (Extralight, Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, Black)

Examples: 0 (zero) has a inner dot. So it is quite different from O (capital o); 1 (one) and l (small caps L) are also distinct. See More

Top Pro

For programmers

Top Con

Ligatures missing

IntellectualShulpae's Experience

Fira looks nicer, ligatures didn't work and it isn't free. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

The font is licensed under SIL open font license with source code available on GitHub. Being an open source font, it's also reasonable to expect incremental upgrades and additions to character sets and functionality. See More

Top Con

Very difficult to read compared to Consolas or Courier New

The characters are much too widely spaced apart to be easily readable. See More

Peter J. Mello's Experience

Of course this is all subjective, but I find too many small annoyances in Source Code Pro to recommend it. The dotted zero is definitely one of the weaker attempts at glyph disambiguation between the capital O and the zero, and I find the character spacing and kerning to just not feel at all harmonious. See More

Top Pro

Several styles available

The code comes with seven style variants: ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, and Black. See More

Top Con

Can be somewhat odd for hex numbers with certain styles

With certain font-size and font-weight combinations (12 pt and regular, for example) capital letters are bigger than integer digits, making hex numbers look weird. See More

Top Pro

Even spacing

Characters are evenly spaced, making for better readability. See More

Top Pro

Legible at small font sizes (HDPI)

Top Pro

Great in print

The font works particularly well when it is in print. See More

Top Pro

Available with Google Web Fonts

The font is hosted on Google Web Fonts directory, meaning that it can be easily embedded in web pages. See More

Top Pro

Good support for international characters

Such as Latin and Cyrillic. See More

Top Pro

Powerline symbols included

Powerline symbols are useful for programmers to display a nicer status bar or mode-line on Vim and Emacs. See More

Top Pro

Very thin (ExtraLight) version available

In case of bad antialiasing makes font boldy on some systems ExtraLight version of this font counteract it and makes text very readable. See More

Top Pro

Offers italics

The beta release version of Source Code Pro introduced italicized characters on Jul 18, 2015. See More

Many fonts look terrible without anti-aliasing. Not Terminus, it looks clear and crisp. See More

score 86 · Answer 2

Terminus

Top Pro

Looks great even without anti-aliasing

Top Con

Italics are not very appealing

Italicized Terminus TTF doesn't appear as aesthetically pleasing as it was intended. See More

HarmoniousNortia's Experience

it's the best See More

Specs

Weights:Regular, Bold

Correctly configured Terminus font is clear and easy to read. See More

Top Pro

Easy to read

Top Con

Noisy on high resolution

It's very compact and well suited for low resolution displays, but lacks air and is too noisy on higher resolution devices. See More

SensibleEnyo's Experience

Best one for a retro tech or sci-fi effect ! See More

Top Pro

Beautiful crunch pixels

Top Con

Slightly less confortable than alternatives

Top Pro

Retro style

Terminus has a beautiful retro-style and looks great on a transparent console window. See More

Top Con

Easy to be confused with different brands of the same or similar name

Like Terminus (Russian production company), Terminus (terminal emulator) or Termius (SSH client). See More

Top Pro

Powerline-support

Ready for your shell/vim theme. See More

Top Con

Ugly, bitmapped font

Top Pro

Pixel-perfect rendering

No blurry characters ever. Every pixel on the screen is used to its full capacity. See More

Top Pro

Terminus is not going fat

Many fonts are fatty when they are used relatively large in size but Terminus does not have this issue. And now it works with IDEA. See More

When using a higher resolution monitor and a smaller font size, the lowercase "i" and lowercase "l" are very difficult to distinguish. The space between the dot and the remainder of the letter seems to somehow disappear, thereby making it look like a solid line, similar to the lowercase "l". Yet on regular DPI screens it looks perfect. See More

score 99 · Answer 3

Hack

Top Pro

Highly legible at all sizes

Top Con

Sometimes difficult to distinguish lowercase "i" and lowercase "l"

UpbeatTenenet's Experience

Good rendering on retina screens See More

Specs

License:MIT

Hack is free for unlimited commercial and non-commercial use. The webfonts are hinted (TrueType instruction set) to optimize display on the screen and are built into all commonly used web font formats with each new release. They include the complete release character set and smaller (filesize) basic Latin subset releases. They are available in the build directory of the repository. See More

Top Pro

Libre webfonts are available in svg, eot, ttf, woff, and woff2 formats

Top Con

Too similar to DejaVu

See this gif comparison between the two fonts. See More

NeighborlyMaat's Experience

Fits the best to my terminal (OSX) See More

Top Pro

Already patched for powerline

Top Con

Non traditional asterisk (*) isn't accurate

Peter J. Mello's Experience

Hack is a great font to have in your toolbag, especially for situations such as setting up new VMs or containers, when there's no reason to invest serious time into an intricate set of interface tweaks. The fact that it comes right out of the archive file ready to work with a Powerline-enabled terminal means you can often have a custom terminal prompt defined in less than a minute. While admittedly I have other fonts that I put to greater use for various reasons, Hack lives up to its billing by rendering cleaner than any other I've seen on Qt-based terminal emulators like Konsole, Yakuake and QTerminal. See More

Top Pro

Fixes many readability issues in Vera/DejaVu

The tilde symbol ('~'), comma (',') and semicolon (';') glyphs have been modified to be more readable at small sizes and/or on non-HD displays. In addition, the underscore symbol ('_') has been slightly lifted for alignment with surrounding characters. See More

Top Pro

Very readable

Top Pro

Good support for combining characters/diacritical marks & fullwidth characters

In terminal emulators that don't automatically correct for this (Alacritty), many monospace fonts will display combining characters and diacritics incorrectly, appearing offset from the base character by as much as an entire column. Additionally, some fonts will not properly handle fullwidth characters, causing them to overlap the following character. This font handles both well, fullwidth characters are properly spaced and combining characters render at their appropriate locations. See More

Top Pro

Avaliable in many GNU/Linux distro package manager

Including Debian/Ubuntu (fonts-hack), Fedora (font-hack-ttf), OpenSUSE (hack-fonts), Arch (ttf-hack) and probably many more. Much nicer than having to manually install/update. See More

Top Pro

Naturally multilingual

Built with over 1500 glyphs in a TrueType file usable by Windows, MacOS, and Linux, Hack has native support for the Extended Latin, Modern Greek, and Cyrillic character sets. See More

Top Pro

Non traditional asterisk (*) is beautiful

Top Pro

Free/Open license

Top Pro

Source code is released in UFO format

UFO source format is widely supported by all modern font editors if you would like to modify the typeface. See More

Top Pro

Based on the tried and tested Bitstream Vera Sans Mono

The fonts are in the Vera Sans Mono lineage with a significant expansion of the character set (which includes Cyrillic and modern Greek character sets), new glyph shapes and modifications of the original glyph shapes, as well as improvements in metrics and hinting/TT instructions to make it more legible at small text sizes used for source code. The changelog is available here. See More

Fira Code supports high pixel density Retina displays. See More

score 57 · Answer 4

Fira Code

Top Pro

Supports Retina displays

Top Con

Too wide. Too large line height.

SpiritedPkharmat's Experience

This font works great when it comes to read and revise long portions of code, since legatures facilitate significantly code reading. In my experience specific bash/zsh combinations may activate wrong macros which generate bad syntax, so I'm not recommending it as a terminal font. See More

Specs

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

Ligatures:Yes

Capital "i", lowercase "L", lowercase "i", number "1"... all look different and easily discernible See More

Top Pro

Clear difference between commonly confused letters

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

SincereAtahensic's Experience

Good for coding! See More

Top Pro

Very good kerning

For instance, "AV", "Pd", and other letter pairs that can have disproportionate space between, have been tuned. See More

Top Con

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

pepoluan's Experience

I've tried practically all well-known "programming font", including (but not limited to) Consolas, Inconsolata, Roboto Mono, Monaco, etc. But when I find Fira Code, I stopped looking. This is the programming font for me. See More

Top Pro

Has a slashed zero

New style since February 2018. See More

Top Con

Noisy serif-like style harming the text clarity

Top Pro

Good for code reading and revision

Top Con

Wrong characters combinations generate wrong syntax on bash/zsh

The first dot in this script is rendered as a bullet point: cp {.,test}/foobar.txt See More

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

Not everywhere support

Top Pro

Ligatures for development

Top Con

Needs support for ligatures

It can't work in plain terminal, must have built in support for ligatures in editor. Note: This is not a drawback of the font per se; but a limitation of terminal apps. See More

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

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. Note: ligatures still consume the same width. However, the disappearance of the space between the symbols that get converted to ligatures (e.g., "==") might make it a bit harder to 'eyeball' the number of characters on a line. See More

Top Pro

Good editor support

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

Frequent updates

The repository is frequently updated. See More

Top Pro

Multi-language

Missing programming ligatures. See More

score 49 · Answer 5

Bitstream DejaVu Sans Mono

Top Pro

Highly legible

Top Con

No ligatures

IntelligentHapantali's Experience

tried this and 'source code pro' on a terminal in ubuntu 16.04. DejaVu Sans Mono Book is way better hands down. Source Code Pro renders characters at different width at fixed intervals, making text look ugly. See More

Specs

License:Bitstream-Vera

Box drawing characters line up correctly. See More

Top Pro

Box drawing characters work well

Top Con

The "-" symbol is short

For example, when using the '-' symbol for borders, it's super short in this font. See More

marcelo's Experience

easy to the eye. Highly legible. See More

Top Pro

Nice uniform spacing

The font is well spaced and doesn't break up words. See More

Top Con

Too much serif on lowercase L

Lowercase L has a top left serif and a bottom right curved serif, and both are too long; so long that they make lowercase L look like an uppercase i. See More

Top Pro

Clean, readable design

Reading the text is pleasant and effortless. Letter forms combine nicely into words. See More

Top Con

Crowded bold styles

At size 12, in bold text, some letters bump up against each other too closely, greatly reducing legibility. See More

Top Pro

Similar letters are well distinguished (1, l, I, 0, O)

Top Con

Dotted zero

Dotted zero is less readable than slashed zero. See More

Top Pro

Available with every linux distribution and works fine in vim, emacs and atom

It's also included in modern versions of Windows. See More

Top Con

Tilde character lacks curvature

The tilde character in this font ('~') does not have enough curvature to be read easily at small sizes. This can be a concern for Unix(-like) shell users and script writers, as the tilde is used relatively often compared to other symbols. See More

Top Pro

Excellent unicode support

DejaVu Sans Mono has one of the most complete Unicode fonts available. This means you have access to a wide range of special symbols including mathematical symbols like arrows, operators, and special alphabets. This is useful for certain languages that require special characters like Agda. Some languages allow using these characters optionally. There are editor modes that display characters like this without changing the underlying file, much like syntax highlighting. The Emacs modes for OCaml and Haskell are prime examples. See More

Top Con

Some characters are similar

Small 'L', capital 'i' and 1 are too similar. See More

score 32 · Answer 6

IBM Plex

Top Con

Lowercase l (ell) is similar to 1 (one)

Top Pro

Open source

Semantyx's Experience

Nice retro look See More

Specs

Weights:8 (Thin, Extra Light, Light, Regular, Text, Medium, Semi Bold, Bold)

Using the "text" weight, this font is more clear at 10-point than other fonts out there. See More

Top Con

Tilde curves too subtle

Top Pro

Sharp at 10-point

Top Con

Missing box drawing glyphs

Lacks proper box drawing glyphs, TUIs look stupid. See More

Top Pro

Italic font is gorgeous

Top Pro

Embellished italics

Top Pro

Distinct brackets

Bracket curves are more exaggerated, making them more distinct. See More

The font has a rounded, smooth aesthetic that is particularly appealing. See More

score 35 · Answer 7

Ubuntu Mono

Top Pro

Pleasant aesthetics

Top Con

Lowercase "i" (eye) is tailed, and too similar to lowercase "l" (ell)

Same with Hack and Red Hat Mono. See More

Specs

License:Ubuntu Font 1.0

SIL Open Font License. See More

Top Pro

Open source font

Top Con

The font is too small

Ubuntu's 13pt looks like 10pt of another font. See More

Top Pro

Excellent readability

Line thickness, shape, and spacing help you to recognize characters and words correctly the first time through, without your eyes having to skip back and re-read. See More

Top Con

Lowercase "m" is weird and stands out

The lowercase "m" in Ubuntu Mono really stands out because of its unusual shape, which disrupts the user's attention when reading. See More

Top Pro

Easily distinguishable characters

There are dotted zeros in Ubuntu Mono so to distinguish from the letter "O", while the lowercase letter "l" is very different from the number "1". See More

Top Con

Many characters seem imbalanced

Some of the characters don't feel like they match well which can be distracting. See More

Top Pro

Legible even at small sizes

The fonts retain legibility and under subpixel rendering at small sizes. See More

Top Con

Dotted zero characters less distinguishable

Dotted zero characters are much less distinguishable than those that are slashed. See More

Top Pro

Many languages

1,200 glyphs, 200-250 languages (native languages of 3 billion people). See More

No pixelation on high pixel density displays. See More

score 8 · Answer 8

PT Mono

Top Pro

Crisp on display

Specs

PT Mono uses slashed zeros and a rounded lowercase "L", while all numbers are easily distinguishable. See More

Top Pro

Clear characters

Top Pro

Slashed Zeros

Zeros are slashed, making it easy to distinguish between big 'O' and zero. See More

Top Pro

Free

Designed by Paratype (http://paratype.com), and freely distributed. See More

Top Pro

Scales very well

Scales very well up or down, losing weight when downscaling to improve legibility of small text. See More

Top Pro

Serif

Serif fonts are in general easier to read than sans-serif ones. See More

Top Pro

Looks good in every OS

Fonts rendering on Mac, Linux and Windows may differ a lot, but this typeface is ideal in all cases. See More

Top Pro

Well-rounded

Rounded serif characters make it easy to read, especially with Sublime Text "subpixel_antialias" and "no_round" options. See More

Top Pro

Comes in multiple styles

Plain, Bold, Italic, Bold Italic, etc. See More

Many letter-forms are available in Input Mono, the width and line-height of which are changeable. There are also non-monospaced sans and sans-serif forms available. See More

score 23 · Answer 9

Input Mono

Top Pro

Customizable

Top Con

Bold 5 and 6 are too similar

Specs

Weights:7 (Thin, Extralight, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, Black)

Input Mono is designed to look good on high DPI and low-resolution screens of variable zoom levels. See More

Top Pro

Free for private use

Top Pro

Great on small-sized, high-resolution screens

Top Pro

Non-monospaced sibling fonts

In addition to the monospaced variant, the Input family of fonts includes serif and non-serif proportional font families. See More

Top Pro

Excellent readability customized to each individual user

With multiple form variants for all of the most-often mistaken characters, there's no need to adapt your eyes to the font, rather you adapt the font to your eyes by building it with the form variants which most naturally distinguish themselves as the character in question at first glance TO YOU. Character form variants are constant throughout all the character sections, so even when they appear with diacritics they appear as the variant you selected when building the font package. See More

Top Pro

Zero may be slashed or dotted to suit user preference

Most fixed pitch fonts today have opted for a dotted zero glyph, despite the fact that there seem to be just as many users who feel a slashed zero is more easily recognized. Input has both styles, so you can choose the one that works best for you when building the font package. See More

Top Pro

Available in many variants

Top Pro

Characters: 1 small 'L' and capital 'i' are easily distinguishable

Top Pro

Large punctuation

The punctuation symbols are larger than in other traditional fonts, making for greater visibility. See More

There is full customization of styles and variants in Iosevka. See More

score 28 · Answer 10

Iosevka

Top Con

Too much height for a terminal

Top Pro

Great customizability

PleasantPheme's Experience

Iosevka makes terminal looks fancy and elegant. It puts terminal on the level of other very polished applications on the Mac and Linux. On Windows it doesn't look well, but it's Windows fault. See More

Specs

Zero Style:Custom

Weights:9 (Thin, Extralight, Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, Extrabold, Heavy)

Ligatures:Custom

For better reading longer texts. See More

Top Con

Letter l loooks like 1

Top Pro

You can build your own font, suiting all your needs

Top Con

The large B looks a little bit unbalanced (top part larger than bottom part)

Top Pro

Also variant with tiny serifs available ("Slab")

Top Pro

Ten different styles

Iosevka provides its font in ten different stylistic sets that are similar to other popular monospace fonts. See More

Top Pro

Supports ligations

Top Pro

Slashed zero

Top Pro

Readable

Iosevka is very clear and legible on all displays and in all sizes. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Iosevka is free and open source. See More

Top Pro

Stylish

Iosevka makes terminal looks fancy and elegant. It puts terminal on the level of other very polished applications on the Mac and Linux. On Windows it doesn't look well, but it's Windows fault. See More

Top Pro

Very narrow (condensed)

Bold text looks a little blurred with font px 11-13. See More

score 25 · Answer 11

Microsoft Consolas

Top Con

Bold font looks messy on Linux terminal

Top Pro

It reads so smooth

This font reads so smooth that it actually feels annoying to see it being treated as a programming font. For god's sake, don't treat it like a programming font, because this is the best general-use sans-serif font. The humanist letterforms and the balanced monospace design are surely a great combination. Not to mention, unlike many other fonts, Consolas is the one to get character shapes "right". The "support bars" design on i and l allows for comfortable text reading unlike the abstract curvy design on some other monospaced fonts. And the r is also done properly, it curves all the way down. See More

NeighborlyCandaules's Experience

Clear and elegant, distinguish well all characters and absolutely prefer barred zero than the dotted one. See More

Specs

License:Proprietary

Consolas costs 129€ for personal use, but you can get it for free (as in beer) bundled with some free MS products (example). See More

Top Con

Not free

Top Pro

Very clean yet all characters can easily be distinguished

Top Con

Not available for Linux

Top Pro

Differentiation can be easily made between alike characters

There is good overall disambiguation of similar-looking characters in Consolas. For example, there are slashed zeroes, meaning the number "0" can be differentiated from the letter "O". See More

Top Con

Small 'L' is too similar to digit 1

You can tell the difference when they are close together, but when used apart, it can be a bit hard. See More

Top Pro

Good width/height ratio to make use of screen space

Top Con

Starting from 9pt, "!" is too similar to "|"

Top Pro

Includes true italics

There are true italics for this font, compared to obliques with most other monospaced fonts. See More

Top Con

Italic font is very different

The italic font (often used for comments) feels jarringly different to the regular one - especially on the "g" and "f" and "l" (lowercase L) glyphs. See More

Top Pro

Includes a large number of unicode ranges

Consolas supports 30+ unicode ranges including Greek, Cyrillic, and Thai for a total of 2735 glyphs. See More

Top Con

Poor legibility with small font-sizes on non-hidpi screens

Consolas in the 9 to 13 pt range is hard on the user's eyes with any monitor that's 1080 p or below. See More

Top Pro

Available for Windows and OS X

The font is available on machines running Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1, as well as part of Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. Otherwise it can be downloaded from Microsoft's homepage. It can also be set up on OS X machines with instructions on how to do it available here. See More

Top Con

Highly aliased with ClearType

Consolas is specifically designed to work with ClearType antialiasing, so it becomes highly aliased when ClearType is not turned on. This can be alleviated to a degree with any basic grayscale anti-aliasing. As an OpenType relative of Consolas, Inconsolata works well without ClearType (Inconsolata-g being the most popular variant). See More

Top Pro

Can display a lot of text due to narrow width

Consolas is really narrow compared to most monospace fonts. The more narrow each symbol, the more text you see on the line. See More

Top Con

Font size can't be changed gradually

Letter height is the same for 9 and 10, and for 11 and 12 pt. When switching from 10 to 11 pt, letter height changes abruptly (whereas line height changes gradually). This makes it impossible to choose exact letter height on a standard display. Size can't be set to 10.5 pt, for example. See More

Top Pro

Nice appearance

Consolas has a good appearance and character without being too distracting. See More

Top Pro

Supports patch that adds Powerline symbols

Consolas can be used with the vim plugin Powerline if the following patch is applied: Patch. See More

It's comfortable for the user to read Code New Roman for long periods. OpenType features include hanging or lining numerals (slashed, dotted, and normal zeros) as well as alternative shapes for a number of lowercase letters. See More

score 11 · Answer 12

Code New Roman

Top Pro

Comfortable to read

Top Pro

Looks clean and beautiful

Code New Roman seems like a mix of Monaco and Consolas, but looks very well on retina monitors. See More

Top Pro

Open license

It is licensed under the SIL Open Font License (OFL) which allows personal and commercial use of the font. See More

Top Pro

Looks great on Ubuntu 14.04

Code New Roman has been tested on cheap Dell Inspiron with Ubuntu 14.04 installed and looks great on gtk-based apps such as Sublime Text, Geany, and TextAdept. It's also great on Qt-based apps such as KDevelop and Spyder. For electron/nwjs-based applications, it looks great on Visual Studio Code and Brackets, but hasn't yet been tested on atom. However, it looks horrible on Swing-based apps such as Netbeans or Jetbrains' IDE. See More

Top Pro

Completely free

Code New Roman is published under SIL Open Font License making it completely free. See More

Top Pro

Multilingual

Code New Roman is available in English and Sinhala. See More

Top Pro

Three different typefaces

Code New Roman offers Regular, Bold , Italic, and Bold-Italic typefaces. See More

Top Pro

Highly anti-aliased

This means that jaggies are reduced, making the line smoother. See More

Top Pro

Available for Windows and OS X

You can download and install it on Windows vista or higher (for cleartype technology support) and Mac OSX. See More

Very clear, distinct characters with decent spacing make Inconsolata very readable. See More

score 11 · Answer 13

Inconsolata

Top Pro

Excellent readability

Top Con

In the regular font width, en dash is indistinguishable from a hyphen; em dash is too similar also

Hyphens are especially wide for the available character width of this monospace font, which makes them easy to see, but if you ever need to distinguish between a hyphen (small dash) and an en dash (medium dash), you'll need to check the text in a different font, or in one of the Inconsolata variable font widths other than "regular." Also, em dash (long dash) is only slightly wider than the hyphen in the regular font width; other widths do a better job of distinguishing dash lengths (e.g. SemiCondensed, SemiExpanded, and Expanded). Maybe a future version of the regular font width will do better at distinguishing between hyphen, en dash, and em dash, to further solidify the font's otherwise very distinguishable character set. See More

Specs

Ligatures:Yes, but disabled by default

Italics:No

Top Pro

Open source

It's an open source font, meaning it's freely available. See More

Top Pro

Efficient scalability

Inconsolata scales well without loss of readability. See More

Top Pro

Slashed zero characters are distinguishable from capital "O" and "Q" characters

Inconsolata-g screws this up by replacing the slashed zero with a dotted zero. A dotted zero is better than a zero with nothing in it, but worse than a slashed zero. See More

Top Pro

Characters readable even at small sizes

The characters in Inconsolata have a slightly "wide" appearance that aids in readability, especially at small font sizes. See More

Top Pro

Widely available

Inconsolata is available in the package managers of almost every open source OS. See More

Top Pro

No visible character breaks

Inconsolata renders lines in TUIs without visible character breaks; apparently unlike Inconsolata-g. See More

Inconsolata mantains its legibility even with small font sizes. See More

score 19 · Answer 14

Inconsolata-g

Top Con

No pretty ligatures

Top Pro

Great scalability

ArtisticAbhartach's Experience

en iyisi bu aq See More

Specs

Top Con

Dotted zero

Dotted zero is less readable than slashed zero See More

Top Pro

Line height is a little larger than normal

This makes the lines feel less crowded which greatly helps readability. See More

Top Con

Renders lines as dashes in TUI interfaces

Lines in items like midnight commander, the treeview in htop, tmux panes, the tree command, et al., have ugly dashed lines instead of straight lines with sharp corners. See More

Top Pro

Fixes clashing of similar characters

Inconsolata-g is a variant of the popular Inconsolata that fixes the similarity between "1" [one] and the "l" [lowercase ell]. See More

Top Con

Requires more work than Inconsolata to install on several OS's

Because Inconsolata is in the package managers for almost all open source OS's, it is much easier to install than Inconsolata-g in most cases. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Inconsolata-g has been released under the Open Font License of SIL. See More

Top Con

No Italic

To improve contrast, italic is best used for comments. See More

Top Con

Looks significantly worse on Windows (ClearType)

Top Con

Character widths are not consistent between regular and bold

Bold characters are not the same width as regular characters so the typeface is not consistently monospace. See More

Top Con

() and {} are difficult to distinguish

The user may have difficulty distinguishing small size () and {} at a glance. See More

Roboto Mono has a very clean and beautiful design. See More

score 13 · Answer 15

Google Roboto Mono

Top Pro

Looks really beautiful

Top Con

Box-drawing characters are a little off

Specs

Top Pro

Readable, elegant and cute

It's very readable, elegant and cute. Almost indistinguishable with SF Mono at small point sizes. It looks great even as a display font. See More

Top Pro

Makes for an excellent font for terminal

Roboto Mono looks particularly well on iterm2. See More

Top Pro

All variants available

Both bold and italics look great in Roboto Mono. See More

Top Pro

Clean and legible

Roboto Mono is crystal clear which makes it a good choice for reading code without your eyes getting tired. See More

Top Pro

Good readable italic variant

Top Pro

Slashed zero

The curly braces are easily distinguishable from parentheses, "0" is distinguishable from "O", and "1" is distinguishable from "l", to name but a few. See More

score 11 · Answer 16

Apple Monaco

Top Pro

Good differentiation between clashing characters

Top Con

Odd rendering "am" with small sizes

ConsiderateInshushinak's Experience

Used Monaco for 15+ years. Change to other fonts for something new but find my way quickly back to Monaco See More

Specs

Top Pro

Easy on user's eyes

Monaco's rendering is similar to that of Consolas but slightly more playful. Each character seems to be a tiny bit larger when compared to Consolas, yet code takes up the same amount of space. See More

Top Con

Only comes with Mac OS X

While it generally only comes with OS X, you can try here for installing on other platforms. See More

Top Pro

Small file size

Even if you are struggling with memory, this font is no concern. Its ttf file is just about 50 kb. See More

Top Con

Ability to select different anti-aliasing grades was dropped

Before OS X Snow Leopard, it was possible to apply varying degrees of anti-aliasing to the font. At present, the previously "medium" anti-aliasing option is the only choice. See More

Top Pro

Excellent legibility at non-antialiased small sizes

This font shines for legibility at non-antialiased small sizes. It was originally designed as a 9 pt bitmap font. This is excellent for when maximizing on-screen code is a priority. See More

Top Pro

The "a" has a fun appearance

Loved it using as my terminal font! See More

score 13 · Answer 17

JetBrains Mono

Top Pro

Easy to use to read

Top Con

Characters are too "high" - wasting space on the screen

SincereAtahensic's Experience

Specs

Weights:8 (Thin, Extralight, Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, Extrabold)

Ligatures:Optional

Free from unnecessary details. See More

Top Pro

Very beautiful

Top Con

No slashed version/option for 0 (zero)

Top Pro

Easy to differentiate l, I, and 1

Top Pro

The dotted zero looks cool

Top Pro

Simple forms

Top Pro

Four different weights

Top Pro

Broad variety for ligature glyphs

Top Pro

Shape of ovals approaches rectangle

Makes vertical reading easier. See More

The lowercase "k" seems like a strange "r" since it has a line that extends to the top of capital letters. There is currently a workaround aiming to correct this. See More

score 16 · Answer 18

Fantasque Sans Mono

Top Pro

Very good readable even on small sizes

Top Con

Lowercase "k" is ugly

CaffeinatedTanfana's Experience

Looks amazing. See More

Specs

Fantasque Sans Mono is open source, meaning it can be freely used, changed, and shared by anyone. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Top Pro

Own personality

It looks distinct, playful. But don't cross the line when it becomes unusable. See More

Top Pro

Handwriting inspired

This aspect of the typeface gives it a unique look. It seems friendly to a lot of people. See More

Top Pro

Cyrillic alphabet support

This is useful for those who wish to use letters from certain Eastern European or Asian alphabets. See More

Top Pro

Truly compact

The Height line is quite short but coherent. You have to like the style but this is one of the most readable at a small size ( 9pts ). See More

Top Pro

No useless experiments with special characters

Top Pro

Support for various platforms

There's support for OS X, Linux, and Windows (otf, ttf) in Fantasque Sans Mono. See More

Top Pro

Powerline symbols

Top Pro

Slashed zero

Top Pro

Uniformity

As a "Mono" font, Fantasque is uniform in size and overalls. However, if you look further into all characters, you'll find that there's almost no pattern between them - except for the huge amount of curves. That said, this font is a very strong contender in terms of readability, especially in a world that seeks pattern (often too much). An example: Double single quotes vs single double quotes. In JavaScript code, you can find empty String initialization a lot. Unless syntax highlighting makes it clear, it's pretty hard with other fonts to spot the difference between double single quotes and single double quote. See More

Top Pro

Nice looking small k

Most mono fonts out there are serif (curves at the ends), Envy Code R is sans-serif (no curves at ends), making it very easy on the eyes for long periods of exposure. See More

score 5 · Answer 19

Envy Code R

Top Pro

A sans-serif mono font

Specs

License:Free

This font is used by some Emacs users on Mac OS X in order to get better performance. See More

score 5 · Answer 20

Fira Mono

Top Pro

Offers better performance in some Emacs builds

Top Con

Large line height

Compared to other options, Fira has a high line height, which reduces the number of lines you can see on screen at one time. See More

Specs

Weights:3 (Regular, Medium, Bold)

Almost looks like Source Code pro and works great with Intelli J where Source Code Pro renders all junk on one of the primary IDE. Very good for people who read code through out the day. See More

Top Pro

Looks great and is easy on eyes

Top Pro

Extremely readable

You can look at the code for hours and hours. The height between lines and the spacing is perfect. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source