When comparing Monoid vs Apple San Francisco Mono, the Slant community recommends Monoid for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Monoid is ranked 19th while Apple San Francisco Mono is ranked 38th. The most important reason people chose Monoid is:
The user can adjust letter-spacing, line-height, and choose alternate characters prior to downloading.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Customisable
The user can adjust letter-spacing, line-height, and choose alternate characters prior to downloading.
Pro Novel use of ligatures to display ascii character combinations as symbols
The common expression '!=' is displayed as '≠', '>=' as '≥' *, while maintaining the fixed width double-space that these characters would normally take, so as to maintain text alignment.
- Many others are supported too - see site for details.
Pro Open source
Monoid is open source meaning it's freely available to anyone.
Pro Sharpness
Pro Larger and easier to read with thin condensed letters
Pro Fine without retina
Probably the only one that is.
Pro Clear and dis·tin·guish·a·ble
Code is very readable at both big and small sizes.
Pro Beautiful with high pixel density
Pro Best legible font
This font is legible in every condition.
Pro Visible punctuation
Punctuation is prominent and easily visible.
Pro Looks good on low and high PPI displays
SF Mono looks good on external monitors and Retina Displays. Large and small font sizes.
Cons
Con Very narrow
Con No bold-italic style
Monoid doesn't offer a style that is both bold and italic.
Con Apple is locking down this font
It's not open in any sense of the word. It even gives warnings if you try to rip it out of the Terminal.app or Xcode bundles. Obviously, Apple only wants it on their tools. This is such a shame. It should work in other editors, too. It's a beautiful font. Apple open sourced swift, why can't they be open with a monospace font?
Con No Ligature support
Does not support Ligatures so it doesn't play well with some terminal themes.
Con Lowercase l (ell) is similar to 1 (one)
Con Slightly difficult to use outside of Xcode, Terminal, or Console
The typeface isn't available in Font Book, etc. unless the user imports the files embedded in the apps above.