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Add to SafariWhen comparing Inconsolata-g vs Google Roboto 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 Roboto Mono is ranked 26th. 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 Looks really beautiful
Roboto Mono has a very clean and beautiful design.
Pro Clean and legible
Roboto Mono is crystal clear which makes it a good choice for reading code without your eyes getting tired.
Pro The right thickness
It's neither too thin, too fat, nor too condensed. Roboto Mono is just right.
Pro All variants available
Both bold and italics look great in Roboto Mono.
Pro Distinctive uppercase vs lowercase characters
The median line is placed relatively low. This makes reading mix-cased words (eg. hashes) easier.
Pro Readable, elegant and cute
It's very readable, elegant and cute. Almost indistinguishable with SF Mono at small point sizes. It looks great even as a display font.
Pro Makes for an excellent font for terminal
Roboto Mono looks particularly well on iterm2.
Pro Released under the lenient Apache License
Pro Powerline Patched version works well
This is the only font that works well and looks good with agnoster theme and powerline for bash/zsh.
Pro Looks great on HiDPI
Looks good at 14pt and lower, but looks great at 20pt and higher, making it an excellent font for higher resolutions
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 Curly braces aren't very distinctive
The curly braces are too close to parentheses, which can harm readability for programming.
Con Not recognized as monospace font
Windows does not recognize the font as monospaced. Cannot be used as terminal font.
Con Sublime Text doesn't show italic version
font face "Roboto Mono" has different widths for italic characters, disabling to prevent text reflow
