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Add to SafariWhen comparing 6x13 fixed vs Input Mono, the Slant community recommends Input Mono for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Input Mono is ranked 4th while 6x13 fixed is ranked 37th. The most important reason people chose Input Mono is:
Input can be configured online with preview: width, weight, line height, and alternate letterforms.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Well designed
6x13 fixed is the apex of bitmap fonts. It has a nice, defined character set and great proportions for quantity of text onscreen, making for excellent readability. It is aesthetically pleasing for a bitmap font and has been deservedly termed 'classic'.
Pro Legible at small sizes
At a small text size, each character has a limited resolution. A character size of 6x13 pixels means only 78 pixels per character. Modern fonts are designed to be scalable and are less legible at these small sizes. Using bitmap fonts increases legibility by eliminating scaling and sub-pixel aliasing artifacts. Some scalable fonts include "ppems" embedded bitmaps for this reason.
Pro Available on every X server
6x13 is the classic fixed monospace bitmap font that is expected to be available on every X server. It is part of the misc-fixed family. These fonts were handcrafted for readability in a terminal.
Pro Widely available
It is distributed alongside the X Window System.
Pro Highly configurable
Input can be configured online with preview: width, weight, line height, and alternate letterforms.
Pro Available in Mono, Sans, and Serif
There are a couple advantages to using a proportionally spaced font in code: comfort of reading, ease of spotting typos, and better differentiation between different kinds of code with font styles. Fontbureau dedicated an entire page to this topic. Unfortunately, a lot of text editors only support monospaced fonts.
Pro Clear distinctions between similar characters
The font is easy to read, has a clear distinction between similar character types, is very customizable with weight and line height. Free for personal/unpublished usage. You can customize the font how you like it on their site before downloading it to use.
In some fonts, it's difficult to distinguish between similar characters such as i/L/1, or o/zero, or m/rn. This font does an incredible job at making all of these examples clearly identifiable.
Pro Clear on low resolution and retina display
The code stays clear on low resolution and retina display with the same font option.
Pro Large, obvious punctuation
Pro Light, Extra-Light, Thin weights
The designer advises using a lighter weight for light-on-dark color schemes.
Pro Serif font is remarkably readable
Pro Condensed and Compressed Thin saves a lot of space
When using the condensed or compressed version with the thin typeface, you gain a lot of screen space and it's still extremely readable for all day coding.
Cons
Con Doesn't have a slashed zero
The absence of non-slashed zeroes makes it harder to distinguish "0" from the letter "O".
Con Extremely small on high-DPI screens
While it is crafted for a screen where the pixels are visible, bitmap fonts do not work well on high-DPI screens as they do not scale too well.
Con Closed source
Although font designers need to make money too, open source model is preferred.
Con No ligatures
This can be a pro or con depending on who you ask, but it would be nice to have the option.
Con In VS2017 this font does not work and displayed as "Courier New"
Con Hard to distinguish "8" from "B" at low sizes
This often impacts upon designers working with hexadecimal numbers. Many fonts address this by either changing the x-height for numerals, making "8" more of an hourglass shape, or making the "B" cap smaller. At 10 pt, there's less than three pixels of a difference (anti-aliased).
Con Gets the job done, but not rounded enough to be pleasant/easy on the eyes
Con Bold 5 and 6 are too similar
Con Decimal digits can blend together in Mono variant
A lot of decimal digits have a similar form, 2's can sometimes look like 8's and so forth, which makes long strings of digits hard to read. I find other fonts like Consolas's digits more legible even at smaller sizes.
In the proportional variants this is less a problem.
Con Easy to confuse lowercase "i" with "1" if you're not used to it
The dot is so close to the body that they fuse, and with the serif on top it looks like the cap of the letter "1". When you put them side by side it's easy to see which one is which, but if you see a code that reads "a+=i" you're going to read that it increments a by 1.
Con The tilde is indistinguishable from a dash
Tilde is basically indistinguishable from a dash, unless you blow the size up huge. The curves in the tilde are too shallow.
