When comparing Meslo LG vs Apple San Francisco Mono, the Slant community recommends Meslo LG for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Meslo LG is ranked 15th while Apple San Francisco Mono is ranked 38th. The most important reason people chose Meslo LG is:
The line spacing in Meslo LG makes it very powerful and gives it an amazing look. The font is especially clear for reading code in Eclipse or Intelli J.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Great line spacing and very easy on user's eyes
The line spacing in Meslo LG makes it very powerful and gives it an amazing look. The font is especially clear for reading code in Eclipse or Intelli J.
Pro Patched Powerline version exists
A patched version for Vim Powerline is easily downloadable and comes with additional glyphs.
Pro Unambiguous characters
The style of characters avoid ambiguity by making every character distinct. For example, a lower case "L" and upper case "i" are unique such that that it cannot be confused, even if you're unfamiliar with the font.
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 It's a bit boring
Con Letter 'm' written in size 10 (bold face) becomes just a black square
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.