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Add to SafariWhen comparing Inconsolata-g vs Apple Menlo, the Slant community recommends Apple Menlo for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Apple Menlo is ranked 3rd while Inconsolata-g is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Apple Menlo is:
Equally well readable as Bitstream Vera/DejaVu Sans Mono, but with slashed zeros (aids with legibility).
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 Great readability
Equally well readable as Bitstream Vera/DejaVu Sans Mono, but with slashed zeros (aids with legibility).
Pro Easy on user's eyes
Characters are very 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 and various punctuation marks are made bigger than normal. This makes them especially good for programmers who keep staring at code for hours.
Pro Clear differentiations
I, I, L, l, 1, O, 0, etc.
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 No bold version
This is not so great on a dark IDE, the characters tend to wash out, unlike something like Consolas.
Con Seems too wide at size 16
The letters become quite wide at size 16, impacting upon readability.
Con Doesn't work at size 10
Menlo displays as expected for size 11 and bigger, but doesn't seem to work very well at size 10. Issues include zero not being the same height as the rest of the numbers and Parenthetical Brackets not matching up perfectly.
