When comparing Proggy Clean vs Fantasque Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends Fantasque Sans Mono for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Fantasque Sans Mono is ranked 27th while Proggy Clean is ranked 42nd. The most important reason people chose Fantasque Sans Mono is:
The handwritten-style italics of Fantasque Sans Mono are quite attractive.
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 Italics look good
The handwritten-style italics of Fantasque Sans Mono are quite attractive.
Pro Open source
Fantasque Sans Mono is open source, meaning it can be freely used, changed, and shared by anyone.
Pro Uniformity
As a "Mono" font, Fantasque is uniform in size and overalls. However, if you look further into all characters, you'll find that there's almost no pattern between them - except for the huge amount of curves. That said, this font is a very strong contender in terms of readability, especially in a world that seeks pattern (often too much).
An example:
Double single quotes vs single double quotes. In JavaScript code, you can find empty String initialization a lot. Unless syntax highlighting makes it clear, it's pretty hard with other fonts to spot the difference between double single quotes and single double quote.
Pro Support for various platforms
There's support for OS X, Linux, and Windows (otf, ttf) in Fantasque Sans Mono.
Pro No useless experiments with special characters
Pro Own personality
It looks distinct, playful. But don't cross the line when it becomes unusable.
Pro Lowercase "k" looks nice
Pro Glyphs support
This is good for those who wish to use different designs of a certain character.
Pro Has ligatures
Alpha version supports ligatures as Fira Code does.
Pro Truly compact
The Height line is quite short but coherent. You have to like the style but this is one of the most readable at a small size ( 9pts ).
Pro Cyrillic alphabet support
This is useful for those who wish to use letters from certain Eastern European or Asian alphabets.
Pro Webfonts included (eot, svg, woff)
Webfonts, such as eot, svg, and woff, are included in Fantasque Sans Mono.
Pro Powerline symbols
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 Lowercase "i" (eye) is tailed, and too similar to lowercase "l" (ell)
Same with Hack and Ubuntu Mono.
Con Lowercase "k" is ugly
The lowercase "k" seems like a strange "r" since it has a line that extends to the top of capital letters. There is currently a workaround aiming to correct this.
Con The size is too small
Letter size is smaller than other fonts at the same setting.