When comparing Consolas vs Operator, the Slant community recommends Consolas for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Consolas is ranked 9th while Operator is ranked 52nd. The most important reason people chose Consolas is:
Consolas has a good appearance and character without being too distracting.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Nice appearance
Consolas has a good appearance and character without being too distracting.
Pro Includes a large number of unicode ranges
Consolas supports 30+ unicode ranges including Greek, Cyrillic, and Thai for a total of 2735 glyphs.
Pro Can display a lot of text due to narrow width
Consolas is really narrow compared to most monospace fonts. The more narrow each symbol, the more text you see on the line.
Pro Available for Windows and OS X
The font is available on machines running Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1, as well as part of Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. Otherwise it can be downloaded from Microsoft's homepage. It can also be set up on OS X machines with instructions on how to do it available here.
Pro Differentiation can be easily made between alike characters
There is good overall disambiguation of similar-looking characters in Consolas. For example, there are slashed zeroes, meaning the number "0" can be differentiated from the letter "O".
Pro Supports patch that adds Powerline symbols
Consolas can be used with the vim plugin Powerline if the following patch is applied: Patch.
Pro Has a script version
Operator can be used to mix the same font for syntax formatting.
Pro Horizontal width not as wide as other fixed width fonts
You can legibly read everything and get more characters per line.
Pro Super readable
Long strings can be read in Operator exceedingly easily. The font just flows nicely, with all the benefits of clarity that provides.
Pro Adorable italics
Cons
Con Not free
Consolas costs 129€ for personal use, but you can get it for free (as in beer) bundled with some free MS products (example).
Con Font size can't be changed gradually
Letter height is the same for 9 and 10, and for 11 and 12 pt. When switching from 10 to 11 pt, letter height changes abruptly (whereas line height changes gradually). This makes it impossible to choose exact letter height on a standard display. Size can't be set to 10.5 pt, for example.
Con Italic font is very different
The italic font (often used for comments) feels jarringly different to the regular one - especially on the "g" and "f" and "l" (lowercase L) glyphs.
Con Highly aliased with ClearType
Consolas is specifically designed to work with ClearType antialiasing, so it becomes highly aliased when ClearType is not turned on. This can be alleviated to a degree with any basic grayscale anti-aliasing.
As an OpenType relative of Consolas, Inconsolata works well without ClearType (Inconsolata-g being the most popular variant).
Con Small 'L' is too similar to digit 1
You can tell the difference when they are close together, but when used apart, it can be a bit hard.
Con Poor legibility with small font-sizes on non-hidpi screens
Consolas in the 9 to 13 pt range is hard on the user's eyes with any monitor that's 1080 p or below.
Con Starting from 9pt, "!" is too similar to "|"
Con Relatively expensive
At $179, this font is on the more expensive side.