When comparing Anka/Coder vs Fira Code, the Slant community recommends Fira Code for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Fira Code is ranked 1st while Anka/Coder is ranked 20th. The most important reason people chose Fira Code is:
This is particularly beneficial for those who wish to use combined letters such as "æ" and other diphthongs. But when it comes to programming, the ability to scan through your code is improved with ligatures for equality, arrow functions, and more.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Zero distinguishable thanks to protruding slash
The zero really stands out and looks quite different from zeroes in most other fonts. The addition of the slash means you'll never have to second guess if that character is actually an "O" or if it is a "0".
Pro Open source
Because it's open source, Anka/Coder is freely available to anyone.
Pro Practical yet stylish
Anka/Coder has just the right balance between style and readability.
Pro Compact
Condensed and, even to a greater extent, narrow versions allow for compact lines without sacrificing readability.
Pro Has ligatures
This is particularly beneficial for those who wish to use combined letters such as "æ" and other diphthongs. But when it comes to programming, the ability to scan through your code is improved with ligatures for equality, arrow functions, and more.
Pro Supports retina displays
Fira Coda supports high pixel density retina displays.
Pro Characters look really nice
Some characters that look odd in other monospace fonts look very nice in Fira Code: @, a, 1, lower-case-L, Q, j, *
Pro Good editor support
A list of supported editors and terminals can be found here.
Pro Has a slashed zero
New style since February 2018.
Pro Frequent updates
The repository is frequently updated.
Pro Installs easily on Mac
Many ligature fonts on Github aren't "mac ready". This font comes pre-compiled and ready to install on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Cons
Con Some characters aren't distinguishable from others
This is especially the case with the colon, which is barely distinguishable from the semi-colon.
Con Not quite as charming at sizes of 10 and 11 pt
There are some hinting issues at these sizes: upper curves are bent sharper while the lower look is squashed to the baseline. Also, the dot of "i" appears merged with the stick at 11 pts. At 9 pts, the font looks good again (nice for watches, compiler output, etc).
Con The '@' Symbol is asymmetric
It's a style, but it would be nice if it would wrap and not just cover the top.
Con No true italic
Italic is just a slanted original, an Oblique. Looks ugly and is difficult on the eyes.
Con Noisy serif-like style harming the text clarity
Con Ligatures are nice-looking but harm clarity
Even though the font combines characters into ligatures, you still need to type the normal characters, and the ligatures make that difficult in many cases.
Con Ligatures like == and === are harder to tell apart than they should be
Con Too wide, too large line height
Con Too wide
Much wider than other fonts.
Con Ligatures lump some characters together and make them hard to read
Con Needs support for ligatures
It can't work in plain terminal, must have built in support for ligatures in editor.
Con No Sublime Text support
Not the font's fault but even the latest Sublime Text builds (e.g. 3126) don't support ligatures.
Con Ligatures break correlation between symbols on screen and the number of characters
This makes it easier to lose the grasp how long lines actually are.
Con Curly braces are not clear enough
Curly braches ("{" and "}") are not clear enough. They are too horizontally narrow, making them look almost like pipes ("|").
Con Bad 4 and r characters, dotted 0
WHY is r a serif?
Con Cannot enable alternative stylistic styles on Xcode
I've tried enabling some of the alternate stylistic styles using Xcode's Font picker, via the "Typography" screen. None of the stylistic styles I enable get reflected in Xcode's code editor, even if I restart Xcode from scratch. I'm not sure whether this is a limitation of Xcode, or of the font itself.
