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Add to SafariWhen comparing Inconsolata-g vs Google Noto Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends Inconsolata-g for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Inconsolata-g is ranked 5th while Google Noto Sans Mono is ranked 102nd. The most important reason people chose Inconsolata-g is:
Inconsolata-g has been released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and open source
Inconsolata-g has been released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Pro Fixes clashing of similar characters
Inconsolata-g is a variant of the popular Inconsolata that fixes the similarity between "1" [one] and the "l" [lowercase ell].
Pro Great scalability
Inconsolata mantains its legibility even with small font sizes.
Pro Line height is a little larger than normal
This makes the lines feel less crowded which greatly helps readability.
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 No Italics
To improve contrast, italics are best used for comments.
Con () and {} are difficult to distinguish
The user may have difficulty distinguishing small size () and {} at a glance.
Con No pretty ligatures
Ligatures are nice-to-have in languages such as Swift.
Con Looks too small next to other fonts
Con Character widths are not consistent between regular and bold
Bold characters are not the same width as regular characters so the typeface is not consistently monospace.
Con Dotted zero
Dotted zero is less readable than slashed zero.
Con Looks significantly worse on Windows (ClearType)
Con Renders lines as dashes in TUI interfaces
Lines in items like midnight commander, the treeview in htop, tmux panes, the tree command, et al., have ugly dashed lines instead of straight lines with sharp corners.
Con Requires more work than Inconsolata to install on several OS's
Because Inconsolata is in the package managers for almost all open source OS's, it is much easier to install than Inconsolata-g in most cases.
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.
