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Add to SafariWhen comparing Google Roboto Mono vs MonoLisa, the Slant community recommends Google Roboto Mono for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Google Roboto Mono is ranked 26th while MonoLisa is ranked 54th. The most important reason people chose Google Roboto Mono is:
Roboto Mono has a very clean and beautiful design.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Looks really beautiful
Roboto Mono has a very clean and beautiful design.
Pro Clean and legible
Roboto Mono is crystal clear which makes it a good choice for reading code without your eyes getting tired.
Pro The right thickness
It's neither too thin, too fat, nor too condensed. Roboto Mono is just right.
Pro All variants available
Both bold and italics look great in Roboto Mono.
Pro Distinctive uppercase vs lowercase characters
The median line is placed relatively low. This makes reading mix-cased words (eg. hashes) easier.
Pro Readable, elegant and cute
It's very readable, elegant and cute. Almost indistinguishable with SF Mono at small point sizes. It looks great even as a display font.
Pro Makes for an excellent font for terminal
Roboto Mono looks particularly well on iterm2.
Pro Released under the lenient Apache License
Pro Powerline Patched version works well
This is the only font that works well and looks good with agnoster theme and powerline for bash/zsh.
Pro Looks great on HiDPI
Looks good at 14pt and lower, but looks great at 20pt and higher, making it an excellent font for higher resolutions
Pro Customizable OpenType features downloads
The website offers customizable downloads for editors that don't support OpenType features natively.
Pro Script variant
It comes with script variant for italics.
Pro Ligatures
The typeface supports over 120 optionally enabled ligatures for common coding tasks.
Pro Italics
The typeface comes with an italic version.
Pro Space
Space used by the characters has been carefully balanced to keep them light to read.
Pro Reading flow
The characters have been designed to flow into each other so that the font feels easy to read.
Pro Distinction
Specific care has been put to make programming characters such as 1, i, and l or O or 0 easy to tell apart.
Pro Wider than usual
As it's wider, this means there's more space for designing characters like "m".
Cons
Con Curly braces aren't very distinctive
The curly braces are too close to parentheses, which can harm readability for programming.
Con Not recognized as monospace font
Windows does not recognize the font as monospaced. Cannot be used as terminal font.
Con Sublime Text doesn't show italic version
font face "Roboto Mono" has different widths for italic characters, disabling to prevent text reflow
Con Not free
This font requires a purchase in order to be used. The cheapest version ('Basic') is 60 dollars. There is a free trial, though.
Con Wider than usual
As it's wider, this means a short adjustment period may be required. If you have a limited amount of horizontal space, the wider glyphs may be problematic as well.
