When comparing Inconsolata-g vs Terminus, the Slant community recommends Inconsolata-g for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Inconsolata-g is ranked 3rd while Terminus is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Inconsolata-g is:
Inconsolata-g has been released under the Open Font License of SIL.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and open source
Inconsolata-g has been released under the Open Font License of SIL.
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 Line height is a little larger than normal
This makes the lines feel less crowded which greatly helps readability.
Pro Great scalability
Inconsolata mantains its legibility even with small font sizes.
Pro Looks great even without anti-aliasing
Many fonts look terrible without anti-aliasing. Not Terminus, it looks clear and crisp.
Pro Beautiful crunch pixels
Pro Terminus is not going fat
Many fonts are fatty when they are used relatively large in size but Terminus does not have this issue. And now it works with IDEA.
Cons
Con () and {} are difficult to distinguish
The user may have difficulty distinguishing small size () and {} at a glance.
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 No pretty ligatures
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 No Italic
To improve contrast, italic is best used for comments.
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 Italics are not very appealing
Italicized Terminus TTF doesn't appear as aesthetically pleasing as it was intended.