When comparing Inconsolata-g vs Dalton Maag Ubuntu 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 Dalton Maag Ubuntu Mono is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Inconsolata-g is:
Inconsolata-g has been released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion 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 readability
Line thickness, shape, and spacing help you to recognize characters and words correctly the first time through, without your eyes having to skip back and re-read.
Pro Pleasant aesthetics
The font has a rounded, smooth aesthetic that is particularly appealing.
Pro Easily distinguishable characters
There are dotted zeroes in Ubuntu Mono so to distinguish from the letter "O" (Oh), while the lowercase letter "l" (ell) is very different from the number "1" (one).
Pro Legible even at small sizes
The fonts retain legibility and under subpixel rendering at small sizes.
Pro Many languages
1,200 glyphs, 200-250 languages (native languages of 3 billion people).
Pro Open source font
SIL Open Font License.
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 Lowercase "i" (eye) is tailed, and too similar to lowercase "l" (ell)
Same with Hack and Red Hat Mono.
Con Many characters seem imbalanced
Some of the characters don't feel like they match well which can be distracting.
Con The font is too small
Ubuntu's 13pt looks like 10pt of another font.
Con Lowercase "m" is weird and stands out
The lowercase "m" in Ubuntu Mono really stands out because of its unusual shape, which disrupts the user's attention when reading.
Con Dotted zero characters less distinguishable
Dotted zero characters are much less distinguishable than those that are slashed.
Con No support for combined unicode characters
For example, x̄ is rendered as x ̄.