When comparing Terminus vs Fantasque Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends Terminus for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Terminus is ranked 18th while Fantasque Sans Mono is ranked 27th. 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 Italics look good
The handwritten-style italics of Fantasque Sans Mono are quite attractive.
Pro Open source
Fantasque Sans Mono is open source, meaning it can be freely used, changed, and shared by anyone.
Pro Uniformity
As a "Mono" font, Fantasque is uniform in size and overalls. However, if you look further into all characters, you'll find that there's almost no pattern between them - except for the huge amount of curves. That said, this font is a very strong contender in terms of readability, especially in a world that seeks pattern (often too much).
An example:
Double single quotes vs single double quotes. In JavaScript code, you can find empty String initialization a lot. Unless syntax highlighting makes it clear, it's pretty hard with other fonts to spot the difference between double single quotes and single double quote.
Pro Support for various platforms
There's support for OS X, Linux, and Windows (otf, ttf) in Fantasque Sans Mono.
Pro No useless experiments with special characters
Pro Own personality
It looks distinct, playful. But don't cross the line when it becomes unusable.
Pro Lowercase "k" looks nice
Pro Glyphs support
This is good for those who wish to use different designs of a certain character.
Pro Has ligatures
Alpha version supports ligatures as Fira Code does.
Pro Truly compact
The Height line is quite short but coherent. You have to like the style but this is one of the most readable at a small size ( 9pts ).
Pro Cyrillic alphabet support
This is useful for those who wish to use letters from certain Eastern European or Asian alphabets.
Pro Webfonts included (eot, svg, woff)
Webfonts, such as eot, svg, and woff, are included in Fantasque Sans Mono.
Pro Powerline symbols
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 Lowercase "i" (eye) is tailed, and too similar to lowercase "l" (ell)
Same with Hack and Ubuntu Mono.
Con Lowercase "k" is ugly
The lowercase "k" seems like a strange "r" since it has a line that extends to the top of capital letters. There is currently a workaround aiming to correct this.
Con The size is too small
Letter size is smaller than other fonts at the same setting.