When comparing Meslo LG vs MonoLisa, the Slant community recommends Meslo LG for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Meslo LG is ranked 15th while MonoLisa is ranked 54th. 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 Customizable OpenType features downloads
The website offers customizable downloads for editors that don't support OpenType features natively.
Pro Script variant
It comes with script variant for italics.
Pro Ligatures
The typeface supports over 120 optionally enabled ligatures for common coding tasks.
Pro Italics
The typeface comes with an italic version.
Pro Space
Space used by the characters has been carefully balanced to keep them light to read.
Pro Reading flow
The characters have been designed to flow into each other so that the font feels easy to read.
Pro Distinction
Specific care has been put to make programming characters such as 1, i, and l or O or 0 easy to tell apart.
Pro Wider than usual
As it's wider, this means there's more space for designing characters like "m".
Cons
Con It's a bit boring
Con Letter 'm' written in size 10 (bold face) becomes just a black square
Con Not free
This font requires a purchase in order to be used. The cheapest version ('Basic') is 60 dollars. There is a free trial, though.
Con Wider than usual
As it's wider, this means a short adjustment period may be required. If you have a limited amount of horizontal space, the wider glyphs may be problematic as well.