When comparing Microsoft Consolas vs Fira Code, the Slant community recommends Fira Code for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Fira Code is ranked 1st while Microsoft Consolas is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Fira Code is:
This is particularly beneficial for those who wish to use combined letters such as "æ" and other diphthongs. But when it comes to programming, the ability to scan through your code is improved with ligatures for equality, arrow functions, and more.
Specs
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Pros
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" (zero) can be differentiated from the letter "O" (Oh).
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 Nice appearance
Consolas has a good appearance and character without being too distracting.
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 Includes true italics
There are true italics for this font, compared to obliques with most other monospaced fonts.
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 It reads so smooth
This font reads so smooth that it actually feels annoying to see it being treated as a programming font. For god's sake, don't treat it like a programming font, because this is the best general-use sans-serif font in my opinion. The humanist letterforms and the balanced monospace design are surely a great combination. Not to mention, unlike many other fonts, Consolas is the one to get character shapes "right". The "support bars" design on i and l allows for comfortable text reading unlike the abstract curvy design on some other monospaced fonts. And the r is also done properly, it curves all the way down.
Pro Supports patch that adds Powerline symbols
Consolas can be used with the vim plugin Powerline if the following patch is applied: Patch.
Pro Writing/reading text in LaTeX
When writing and reading text in LaTeX text editor, the content is code and text. Code can be read in other fonts, but reading main text in programming fonts other than Consolas can get you frustrated and irritated.
Pro Has ligatures
This is particularly beneficial for those who wish to use combined letters such as "æ" and other diphthongs. But when it comes to programming, the ability to scan through your code is improved with ligatures for equality, arrow functions, and more.
Pro Supports retina displays
Fira Coda supports high pixel density retina displays.
Pro Characters look really nice
Some characters that look odd in other monospace fonts look very nice in Fira Code: @, a, 1, lower-case-L, Q, j, *
Pro Good editor support
A list of supported editors and terminals can be found here.
Pro Has a slashed zero
New style since February 2018.
Pro Frequent updates
The repository is frequently updated.
Pro Installs easily on Mac
Many ligature fonts on Github aren't "mac ready". This font comes pre-compiled and ready to install on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
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 Starting from 9pt, "!" is too similar to "|"
Con Not avaiable for Linux
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 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 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 The '@' Symbol is asymmetric
It's a style, but it would be nice if it would wrap and not just cover the top.
Con No true italic
Italic is just a slanted original, an Oblique. Looks ugly and is difficult on the eyes.
Con Noisy serif-like style harming the text clarity
Con Ligatures are nice-looking but harm clarity
Even though the font combines characters into ligatures, you still need to type the normal characters, and the ligatures make that difficult in many cases.
Con Ligatures like == and === are harder to tell apart than they should be
Con Too wide, too large line height
Con Too wide
Much wider than other fonts.
Con Ligatures lump some characters together and make them hard to read
Con Needs support for ligatures
It can't work in plain terminal, must have built in support for ligatures in editor.
Con No Sublime Text support
Not the font's fault but even the latest Sublime Text builds (e.g. 3126) don't support ligatures.
Con Ligatures break correlation between symbols on screen and the number of characters
This makes it easier to lose the grasp how long lines actually are.
Con Curly braces are not clear enough
Curly braches ("{" and "}") are not clear enough. They are too horizontally narrow, making them look almost like pipes ("|").
Con Bad 4 and r characters, dotted 0
WHY is r a serif?
Con Cannot enable alternative stylistic styles on Xcode
I've tried enabling some of the alternate stylistic styles using Xcode's Font picker, via the "Typography" screen. None of the stylistic styles I enable get reflected in Xcode's code editor, even if I restart Xcode from scratch. I'm not sure whether this is a limitation of Xcode, or of the font itself.