When comparing M+ 1 Code vs Fantasque Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends M+ 1 Code for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” M+ 1 Code is ranked 8th while Fantasque Sans Mono is ranked 27th. The most important reason people chose M+ 1 Code is:
This is a non-copyleft license that has minimal requirements regarding redistribution of the software.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
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 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.
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.
