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Add to SafariWhen comparing Inconsolata vs Google Noto Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends Inconsolata for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Inconsolata is ranked 52nd while Google Noto Sans Mono is ranked 102nd. The most important reason people chose Inconsolata is:
The characters in Inconsolata have a slightly "wide" appearance that aids in readability, especially at small font sizes.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Excellent readability
Very clear, distinct characters with decent spacing make Inconsolata very readable.
Pro Efficient scalability
Inconsolata scales well without loss of readability.
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.
Pro Open source
It's an open source font, meaning it's freely available.
Pro No visible character breaks
Inconsolata renders lines in TUIs without visible character breaks; apparently unlike Inconsolata-g.
Pro Widely available
Inconsolata is available in the package managers of almost every open source OS.
Pro Excellent support for Unicode characters
Unicode uses 16 bits per character, meaning that it can represent more than 65,000 unique characters.
Cons
Con Arched braces
Too much arched braces, decreases clarity, touching characters almost.
Con Zero is difficult to identify
As it's not dotted or slashed, "0" is more difficult to distinguish.
Con Non-monospace ligature replacements for 'fl', 'fi', 'ffl', 'ffi'
By default, the substrings 'fl', 'fi', 'ffl', and 'ffi' are each crammed into one character width, making it not a truly monospace font. For example, the word 'flag' is rendered as three characters wide.
Con Letters capital 'i' and lowercase 'L' are too similar
The only difference is almost unnoticable.
Con Difficult to distinguish between a period and acomma as well as a colon and a semi-colon
Comma has very small tail, making it difficult to distinguish from a period (full stop). Same applies to colon and semi-colon.
