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Add to SafariWhen comparing Dalton Maag Ubuntu Mono vs Input Mono, the Slant community recommends Input Mono for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Input Mono is ranked 4th while Dalton Maag Ubuntu Mono is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Input Mono is:
Input can be configured online with preview: width, weight, line height, and alternate letterforms.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Highly configurable
Input can be configured online with preview: width, weight, line height, and alternate letterforms.
Pro Available in Mono, Sans, and Serif
There are a couple advantages to using a proportionally spaced font in code: comfort of reading, ease of spotting typos, and better differentiation between different kinds of code with font styles. Fontbureau dedicated an entire page to this topic. Unfortunately, a lot of text editors only support monospaced fonts.
Pro Clear distinctions between similar characters
The font is easy to read, has a clear distinction between similar character types, is very customizable with weight and line height. Free for personal/unpublished usage. You can customize the font how you like it on their site before downloading it to use.
In some fonts, it's difficult to distinguish between similar characters such as i/L/1, or o/zero, or m/rn. This font does an incredible job at making all of these examples clearly identifiable.
Pro Clear on low resolution and retina display
The code stays clear on low resolution and retina display with the same font option.
Pro Large, obvious punctuation
Pro Light, Extra-Light, Thin weights
The designer advises using a lighter weight for light-on-dark color schemes.
Pro Serif font is remarkably readable
Pro Condensed and Compressed Thin saves a lot of space
When using the condensed or compressed version with the thin typeface, you gain a lot of screen space and it's still extremely readable for all day coding.
Cons
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 ̄.
Con Closed source
Although font designers need to make money too, open source model is preferred.
Con No ligatures
This can be a pro or con depending on who you ask, but it would be nice to have the option.
Con In VS2017 this font does not work and displayed as "Courier New"
Con Hard to distinguish "8" from "B" at low sizes
This often impacts upon designers working with hexadecimal numbers. Many fonts address this by either changing the x-height for numerals, making "8" more of an hourglass shape, or making the "B" cap smaller. At 10 pt, there's less than three pixels of a difference (anti-aliased).
Con Gets the job done, but not rounded enough to be pleasant/easy on the eyes
Con Bold 5 and 6 are too similar
Con Decimal digits can blend together in Mono variant
A lot of decimal digits have a similar form, 2's can sometimes look like 8's and so forth, which makes long strings of digits hard to read. I find other fonts like Consolas's digits more legible even at smaller sizes.
In the proportional variants this is less a problem.
Con Easy to confuse lowercase "i" with "1" if you're not used to it
The dot is so close to the body that they fuse, and with the serif on top it looks like the cap of the letter "1". When you put them side by side it's easy to see which one is which, but if you see a code that reads "a+=i" you're going to read that it increments a by 1.
Con The tilde is indistinguishable from a dash
Tilde is basically indistinguishable from a dash, unless you blow the size up huge. The curves in the tilde are too shallow.
