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Add to SafariWhen comparing Adobe Source Code Pro vs Fira Code, the Slant community recommends Fira Code for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Fira Code is ranked 1st while Adobe Source Code Pro is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose Fira Code is:
This is particularly beneficial for those who wish to use combined letters such as "æ" and other diphthongs. But when it comes to programming, the ability to scan through your code is improved with ligatures for equality, arrow functions, and more.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy on user's eyes
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.
Pro Legible on all displays
The characters have been made in such a way that they are easily discernible and usable regardless of font size, weight, and display.
Pro Free and open source
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.
Pro Even spacing
Characters are evenly spaced, making for better readability.
Pro Great in print
The font works particularly well when it is in print.
Pro Several styles available
The code comes with seven style variants: ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, and Black.
Pro Offers italics
The beta release version of Source Code Pro introduced italicized characters on Jul 18, 2015.
Pro Available with Google Web Fonts
The font is hosted on Google Web Fonts directory, meaning that it can be easily embedded in web pages.
Pro Powerline symbols included
Powerline symbols are useful for programmers to display a nicer status bar or mode-line on Vim and Emacs.
Pro Version with ligature support for Haskell is available
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.
Pro Light and Extra Light weights available
The Light and Extra Light weights make the font less "bold" looking when reading.
Pro Has ligatures
This is particularly beneficial for those who wish to use combined letters such as "æ" and other diphthongs. But when it comes to programming, the ability to scan through your code is improved with ligatures for equality, arrow functions, and more.
Pro Supports retina displays
Fira Coda supports high pixel density retina displays.
Pro Characters look really nice
Some characters that look odd in other monospace fonts look very nice in Fira Code: @, a, 1, lower-case-L, Q, j, *
Pro Good editor support
A list of supported editors and terminals can be found here.
Pro Has a slashed zero
New style since February 2018.
Pro Frequent updates
The repository is frequently updated.
Pro Installs easily on Mac
Many ligature fonts on Github aren't "mac ready". This font comes pre-compiled and ready to install on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Cons
Con Dotted zero lacks clarity
Dotted zero characters are less distinct from capital "O" characters than slashed zero characters.
Con Very difficult to read compared to Consolas or Courier New
The characters are much too widely spaced apart to be easily readable.
Con Excessive line spacing
The lines are spaced too far apart.
Con Ligatures missing but you can try Hasklig font if you want ligature
Con Can be somewhat odd for hex numbers with certain styles
With certain font-size and font-weight combinations (12 pt and regular, for example) capital letters are bigger than integer digits, making hex numbers look weird.
Con Incomplete Unicode support
This font is missing many unicode characters used to "beautify" various terminal apps. Also missing are programming ligatures used in some languages.
Con The '@' Symbol is asymmetric
It's a style, but it would be nice if it would wrap and not just cover the top.
Con No true italic
Italic is just a slanted original, an Oblique. Looks ugly and is difficult on the eyes.
Con Noisy serif-like style harming the text clarity
Con Ligatures are nice-looking but harm clarity
Even though the font combines characters into ligatures, you still need to type the normal characters, and the ligatures make that difficult in many cases.
Con Ligatures like == and === are harder to tell apart than they should be
Con Too wide, too large line height
Con Too wide
Much wider than other fonts.
Con Ligatures lump some characters together and make them hard to read
Con Needs support for ligatures
It can't work in plain terminal, must have built in support for ligatures in editor.
Con No Sublime Text support
Not the font's fault but even the latest Sublime Text builds (e.g. 3126) don't support ligatures.
Con Ligatures break correlation between symbols on screen and the number of characters
This makes it easier to lose the grasp how long lines actually are.
Con Curly braces are not clear enough
Curly braches ("{" and "}") are not clear enough. They are too horizontally narrow, making them look almost like pipes ("|").
Con Bad 4 and r characters, dotted 0
WHY is r a serif?
Con Cannot enable alternative stylistic styles on Xcode
I've tried enabling some of the alternate stylistic styles using Xcode's Font picker, via the "Typography" screen. None of the stylistic styles I enable get reflected in Xcode's code editor, even if I restart Xcode from scratch. I'm not sure whether this is a limitation of Xcode, or of the font itself.
