When comparing Terminus vs Apple San Francisco Mono, the Slant community recommends Terminus for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Terminus is ranked 18th while Apple San Francisco Mono is ranked 38th. The most important reason people chose Terminus is:
Many fonts look terrible without anti-aliasing. Not Terminus, it looks clear and crisp.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Looks great even without anti-aliasing
Many fonts look terrible without anti-aliasing. Not Terminus, it looks clear and crisp.

Pro Beautiful crunch pixels
Pro Pixel-perfect rendering
No blurry characters ever. Every pixel on the screen is used to its full capacity.
Pro Terminus is not going fat
Many fonts are fatty when they are used relatively large in size but Terminus does not have this issue. And now it works with IDEA.
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 Italics are not very appealing
Italicized Terminus TTF doesn't appear as aesthetically pleasing as it was intended.
Con It doesn't look very nice
Con Square
Con Easy to be confused with different brands of the same or similar name
Like Terminus (Russian production company), Terminus (terminal emulator) or Termius (SSH client).
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.
