When comparing Tiny Font vs Apple San Francisco Mono, the Slant community recommends Apple San Francisco Mono for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Apple San Francisco Mono is ranked 38th while Tiny Font is ranked 128th. The most important reason people chose Apple San Francisco Mono is:
Code is very readable at both big and small sizes.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Legible at extremely small point sizes
Tiny Font stands at just 4 pixels short (5 with descenders), yet includes every printable ASCII character.
Pro Clear and dis·tin·guish·a·ble
Code is very readable at both big and small sizes.
Pro Beautiful with high pixel density
Pro Best legible font
This font is legible in every condition.
Pro Visible punctuation
Punctuation is prominent and easily visible.
Pro Looks good on low and high PPI displays
SF Mono looks good on external monitors and Retina Displays. Large and small font sizes.
Cons
Con Pointless to use this for legibility unless you're on an exceptionally small screen device
The tiny point size does not scale well. It's designed for a singular purpose and does well for that, but unless you're working around those limitations the poor readability will slow down your work.
Con Not as pretty as other fonts
Other options look better than Tiny Font at bigger sizes.
Con Apple is locking down this font
It's not open in any sense of the word. It even gives warnings if you try to rip it out of the Terminal.app or Xcode bundles. Obviously, Apple only wants it on their tools. This is such a shame. It should work in other editors, too. It's a beautiful font. Apple open sourced swift, why can't they be open with a monospace font?
Con No Ligature support
Does not support Ligatures so it doesn't play well with some terminal themes.
Con Lowercase l (ell) is similar to 1 (one)
Con Slightly difficult to use outside of Xcode, Terminal, or Console
The typeface isn't available in Font Book, etc. unless the user imports the files embedded in the apps above.