When comparing Fira Mono vs Google Noto Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends Fira Mono for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Fira Mono is ranked 51st while Google Noto Sans Mono is ranked 102nd. The most important reason people chose Fira Mono is:
Almost looks like Source Code pro and works great with Intelli J where Source Code Pro renders all junk on one of the primary IDE. Very good for people who read code through out the day.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Looks great and is easy on eyes
Almost looks like Source Code pro and works great with Intelli J where Source Code Pro renders all junk on one of the primary IDE.
Very good for people who read code through out the day.
Pro Extremely readable
You can look at the code for hours and hours. The height between lines and the spacing is perfect.
Pro Offers better performance in some Emacs builds
This font is used by some Emacs users on Mac OS X in order to get better performance.
Pro Excellent support for Unicode characters
Unicode uses 16 bits per character, meaning that it can represent more than 65,000 unique characters.
Cons
Con Large line height
Compared to other options, Fira has a high line height, which reduces the number of lines you can see on screen at one time.
Con Zero is difficult to identify
As it's not dotted or slashed, "0" is more difficult to distinguish.
Con Non-monospace ligature replacements for 'fl', 'fi', 'ffl', 'ffi'
By default, the substrings 'fl', 'fi', 'ffl', and 'ffi' are each crammed into one character width, making it not a truly monospace font. For example, the word 'flag' is rendered as three characters wide.
Con Letters capital 'i' and lowercase 'L' are too similar
The only difference is almost unnoticable.
Con Difficult to distinguish between a period and acomma as well as a colon and a semi-colon
Comma has very small tail, making it difficult to distinguish from a period (full stop). Same applies to colon and semi-colon.