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Add to SafariWhen comparing Apple Menlo vs M+ 1 Code, the Slant community recommends Apple Menlo for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Apple Menlo is ranked 3rd while M+ 1 Code is ranked 8th. 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
Question 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 Permissive free software licence
This is a non-copyleft license that has minimal requirements regarding redistribution of the software.
Pro Narrow font is great for teaching
M+ 1m allows you to fit much more code on slides yet still have them be highly legible, making it a great choice for teaching.
Pro 17 different character-encodings available
- ISO-8859-1, Latin-1 Western European
- ISO-8859-2, Latin-2 Central European
- ISO-8859-3, Latin-3 South European
- ISO-8859-4, Latin-4 North European
- ISO-8859-5, Latin/Cyrillic
- ISO-8859-7, Latin/Greek
- ISO-8859-8, Latin/Hebrew
- ISO-8859-9, Latin-5 Turkish
- ISO-8859-10, Latin-6 Nordic
- ISO-8859-13, Latin-7 Baltic Rim
- ISO-8859-14, Latin-8 Celtic
- ISO-8859-15, Latin-9 A revision of 8859-1
- ISO-8859-16, Latin-10 South-Eastern European
- T1 Encoding, Default 8-bit encoding in many TeX installations
- Windows-1252, Used by default in the legacy components of MS Windows
- WGL4, Pan-European character set defined by Microsoft
- VISCII, Vietnamese standard character set
Pro Five weights from Thin to Bold
The five font weights available are thin, light, regular, medium, and bold.
Pro Works well with Japanese
The widths are half that of the Japanese characters in the font.
Pro High legibility
M+ M Type-1 (1M) was created to emphasize the balance of natural letterform and high legibility.
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 Top narrow
Con Certain pseudo-graphic characters take two spaces
In this font, some pseudo-graphic characters can take up two spaces instead of one.
