When comparing PT Mono vs 6x13 fixed, the Slant community recommends PT Mono for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” PT Mono is ranked 14th while 6x13 fixed is ranked 37th. The most important reason people chose PT Mono is:
PT Mono uses slashed zeros and a rounded lowercase "L", while all numbers are easily distinguishable.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Clear characters
PT Mono uses slashed zeros and a rounded lowercase "L", while all numbers are easily distinguishable.
Pro Crisp on display
No pixelation on high pixel density displays.
Pro Clearest parentheses/braces/brackets
You will read ({[ something like this with PT Mono smoothly on screen on any size and quality.
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 ligatures
Con Lower t stem is short, too similar to lower c
Preferentially, lower f, i, r, have feet, however fortunately lower l (ell) is tailed.
Con No Greek letters
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.