When comparing IBM Plex Mono vs Google Noto Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends IBM Plex Mono for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” IBM Plex Mono is ranked 50th while Google Noto Sans Mono is ranked 102nd. The most important reason people chose IBM Plex Mono is:
Bracket curves are more exaggerated, making them more distinct.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Distinct brackets
Bracket curves are more exaggerated, making them more distinct.
Pro Open source
Pro Sharp at 10-point
Using the "text" weight, this font is more clear at 10-point than other fonts out there.
Pro Embellished italics
Pro Excellent support for Unicode characters
Unicode uses 16 bits per character, meaning that it can represent more than 65,000 unique characters.
Cons
Con Lowercase l (ell) is similar to 1 (one)
Con Tilde curves too subtle
Con Zero is difficult to identify
As it's not dotted or slashed, "0" is more difficult to distinguish.
Con Non-monospace ligature replacements for 'fl', 'fi', 'ffl', 'ffi'
By default, the substrings 'fl', 'fi', 'ffl', and 'ffi' are each crammed into one character width, making it not a truly monospace font. For example, the word 'flag' is rendered as three characters wide.
Con Letters capital 'i' and lowercase 'L' are too similar
The only difference is almost unnoticable.
Con Difficult to distinguish between a period and acomma as well as a colon and a semi-colon
Comma has very small tail, making it difficult to distinguish from a period (full stop). Same applies to colon and semi-colon.