When comparing Anonymous Pro vs DejaVu Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends DejaVu Sans Mono for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” DejaVu Sans Mono is ranked 2nd while Anonymous Pro is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose DejaVu Sans Mono is:
It's easy to distinguish between characters such as I, 1, l, O, and 0 in DejaVu Sans Mono.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
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 Readable even at small sizes
Anonymous Pro is easily legible at small sizes as a bitmap font.
Pro Very clear distinction between similar characters
It's easy to distinguish between characters such as I, 1, l, O, and 0 in DejaVu Sans Mono.
Pro Clean, readable design
Reading the text is pleasant and effortless. Letter forms combine nicely into words.
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.
Pro Bold font is the same width as the regular weight font
The Sans Mono version is graphically close to Andale Mono (Microsoft core web font), slightly bolder, with the added bonus of the bold font being the same width as the regular one (unlike Andale Mono). It is a nice property with some syntax highlighting text editors.
Pro Nice uniform spacing
The font is well spaced and doesn't break up words.
Pro Available with every linux distribution and works fine in vim, emacs and atom
It's also included in modern versions of Windows.
Pro It's subtle, yet stylish and extremely readable, very easy on eyes and very effective for long development sessions
Pro Closely related to MobaFont
For MobaXterm users, this font closely mirrors the embedded MobaFont so they can use a monospace font across other applications.
Cons
Con Hard to distinguish [ and {
Braces [] and {} are very similar.
Con Small punctuation makes readability difficult
In some programs it's hard to see punctuation marks, especially periods and colons.
Con Smaller than other monospace fonts
Con Small 'L' is too similar to big 'i'
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' letter.
Con "0" glitch
The 0 (zero) symbol has a 'dent' on the left.
Con Smaller then other monospaced fonts
Size 13 of Source Code Pro is slightly larger then size 14 of Anonymous Pro.
Con Exaggerated italics
The italicized version of the font is too slanted, meaning that italicized comments in code look really unbalanced.
Con The "-" symbol is short
For example, when using the '-' symbol for borders, it's super short in this font.
Con Crowded bold styles
At size 12, in bold text, some letters bump up against each other too closely, greatly reducing legibility.
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.
Con Dotted zero
Dotted zero is less readable than slashed zero.
Con Not suitable for Vietnamese
This font is really ugly when used with Vietnamese characters.
Con No ligatures
Missing programming ligatures.
Con Missing some Vietnamese characters
ấ, ề, ự, etc. are missing in DejaVu Sans Mono.
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.
Con Some characters are similar
Small 'L', capital 'i' and 1 are too similar.