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Add to SafariWhen comparing Inconsolata-g vs 6x13 fixed, the Slant community recommends Inconsolata-g for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Inconsolata-g is ranked 5th while 6x13 fixed is ranked 37th. 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 Well designed
6x13 fixed is the apex of bitmap fonts. It has a nice, defined character set and great proportions for quantity of text onscreen, making for excellent readability. It is aesthetically pleasing for a bitmap font and has been deservedly termed 'classic'.
Pro Legible at small sizes
At a small text size, each character has a limited resolution. A character size of 6x13 pixels means only 78 pixels per character. Modern fonts are designed to be scalable and are less legible at these small sizes. Using bitmap fonts increases legibility by eliminating scaling and sub-pixel aliasing artifacts. Some scalable fonts include "ppems" embedded bitmaps for this reason.
Pro Available on every X server
6x13 is the classic fixed monospace bitmap font that is expected to be available on every X server. It is part of the misc-fixed family. These fonts were handcrafted for readability in a terminal.
Pro Widely available
It is distributed alongside the X Window System.
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 Doesn't have a slashed zero
The absence of non-slashed zeroes makes it harder to distinguish "0" from the letter "O".
Con Extremely small on high-DPI screens
While it is crafted for a screen where the pixels are visible, bitmap fonts do not work well on high-DPI screens as they do not scale too well.
