When comparing Proggy Clean vs Apple San Francisco Mono, the Slant community recommends Apple San Francisco Mono for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Apple San Francisco Mono is ranked 38th while Proggy Clean is ranked 42nd. The most important reason people chose Apple San Francisco Mono is:
Code is very readable at both big and small sizes.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro The easiest to read
All characters are completely readable in the smallest size.
Perfectly usable in terminal and code editors in 12px text size.
Pro Hipster among hipsters
Even hipsters will marvel at this font, praising you as the new hipster lord. It is best at around 19px (tested on Mac). Overall, it has better readability than many default fonts.
Pro Clear and dis·tin·guish·a·ble
Code is very readable at both big and small sizes.
Pro Beautiful with high pixel density
Pro Best legible font
This font is legible in every condition.
Pro Visible punctuation
Punctuation is prominent and easily visible.
Pro Looks good on low and high PPI displays
SF Mono looks good on external monitors and Retina Displays. Large and small font sizes.
Cons
Con Pixelated
This is, of course, intentional; but it can be hard to look at compared to other smooth mono-space fonts.
Con Smallest font sizes hard to read
Fonts less than 11pt start to fail readability tests. 9pt specifically has an additional issue where brackets don't align.
Con Not really good in all font-sizes
Completely clean pixels, no anti-aliasing so its best viewed in (n*12) pixel size.
Bold font-weight is not really good because of small padding between them.
Con Apple is locking down this font
It's not open in any sense of the word. It even gives warnings if you try to rip it out of the Terminal.app or Xcode bundles. Obviously, Apple only wants it on their tools. This is such a shame. It should work in other editors, too. It's a beautiful font. Apple open sourced swift, why can't they be open with a monospace font?
Con No Ligature support
Does not support Ligatures so it doesn't play well with some terminal themes.
Con Lowercase l (ell) is similar to 1 (one)
Con Slightly difficult to use outside of Xcode, Terminal, or Console
The typeface isn't available in Font Book, etc. unless the user imports the files embedded in the apps above.