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Add to SafariWhen comparing Anonymous Pro vs Apple San Francisco Mono, the Slant community recommends Anonymous Pro for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Anonymous Pro is ranked 9th while Apple San Francisco Mono is ranked 38th. The most important reason people chose Anonymous Pro is:
Anonymous Pro is easily legible at small sizes as a bitmap font.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Readable even at small sizes
Anonymous Pro is easily legible at small sizes as a bitmap font.
Pro The best rendering character for DIGIT ONE
Pro Clashing characters are clearly distinguishable
Characters that could be mistaken for one another (O, 0, I, l, 1, etc.) have distinct shapes to make them easier to tell apart in the context of source code.
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 Small 'l' (ell) is too similar to big 'I' (Eye)
You can tell the difference but need to concentrate on the letters.
See the word "Illegal" as an example.
It would be better if serifs are a little bit wider for the big 'I' (Eye) letter.
Con Smaller than other monospace fonts
Con Small punctuation makes readability difficult
In some programs it's hard to see punctuation marks, especially periods and colons.
Con Smaller then other monospaced fonts
Size 13 of Source Code Pro is slightly larger then size 14 of Anonymous Pro.
Con "0" glitch
The 0 (zero) symbol has a 'dent' on the left.
Con Exaggerated italics
The italicized version of the font is too slanted, meaning that italicized comments in code look really unbalanced.
Con Hard to distinguish [ and {
Braces [] and {} are very similar.
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.
