When comparing Hermit vs Google Noto Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends Hermit for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Hermit is ranked 75th while Google Noto Sans Mono is ranked 102nd. The most important reason people chose Hermit is:
The design of Hermit is clear and legible.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Good design
The design of Hermit is clear and legible.
Pro OFL licensed
This means that the font is free and open source.
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 Bold weight has larger width & height
Makes mixing bold/regular weight cause un-even spacing
https://github.com/pcaro90/hermit/issues/5
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.