Adobe Source Code Pro vs Microsoft Consolas

The characters in Source Code Pro are easily readable. They have consistent widths across all weights as to not break up words. Commonly used programming symbols (such as various kinds of brackets) are made easily discernible from each other while various punctuation marks are made bigger than normal. This makes them especially good for programmers who keep staring at code for hours.

The characters have been made in such a way that they are easily discernible and usable regardless of font size, weight, and display.

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.

Characters are evenly spaced, making for better readability.

The font works particularly well when it is in print.

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

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

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

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

A version of Source Code Pro with support for common Haskell composite glyphs such as >>= is available here. An editor with ligature support, such as Leksah, is required.

The Light and Extra Light weights make the font less "bold" looking when reading.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 in my opinion. 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.

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

When writing and reading text in LaTeX text editor, the content is code and text. Code can be read in other fonts, but reading main text in programming fonts other than Consolas can get you frustrated and irritated.