When comparing Apple Menlo vs Hasklig, the Slant community recommends Apple Menlo for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Apple Menlo is ranked 3rd while Hasklig is ranked 28th. 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 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.
Pro Great for Haskell
Pro Has a heavier appearance than Fira Code or Monoid
Pro Completely free and open source
Freely available via GitHub, therefore can be modified and improved by anyone.
Pro Has many variants such as Italic, Bold Italic, Light, Semibold, etc., etc
Cons
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.
Con Lacks !=
Some coding fonts with ligatures, like Fira Code, turn != into ≠, but Hasklig does not. The reason for this is that Hasklig was designed for Haskell code, and so turns /= into ≠ instead.
Con Some Ligatures like -<< don't look that good.
Con Has a heavier appearance than Fira Code or Monoid
Con No support for many editors, including emacs
Unfortunately, not supporting emacs is the number one reason I don't use this font all the time.
Con Very cute but not WYSIWYG
You want to see exactly what you've typed, not have your brain have to do a little dance every time you see one of these artifacts.