When comparing Terminus vs Apple Menlo, the Slant community recommends Apple Menlo for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Apple Menlo is ranked 3rd while Terminus is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Apple Menlo is:
Equally well readable as Bitstream Vera/DejaVu Sans Mono, but with slashed zeros (aids with legibility).
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 Great readability
Equally well readable as Bitstream Vera/DejaVu Sans Mono, but with slashed zeros (aids with legibility).
Pro Easy on user's eyes
Characters are very readable. They have consistent widths across all weights as to not break up words. Commonly used programming symbols such as various kinds of brackets are made easily discernible from each other and various punctuation marks are made bigger than normal. This makes them especially good for programmers who keep staring at code for hours.
Pro Clear differentiations
I, I, L, l, 1, O, 0, etc.
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 No bold version
This is not so great on a dark IDE, the characters tend to wash out, unlike something like Consolas.
Con Seems too wide at size 16
The letters become quite wide at size 16, impacting upon readability.
Con Doesn't work at size 10
Menlo displays as expected for size 11 and bigger, but doesn't seem to work very well at size 10. Issues include zero not being the same height as the rest of the numbers and Parenthetical Brackets not matching up perfectly.