When comparing Input Mono vs Google Noto Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends Input Mono for most people. In the question“What are the best fonts to use in a terminal emulator?” Input Mono is ranked 9th while Google Noto Sans Mono is ranked 38th. The most important reason people chose Input Mono is:
Many letter-forms are available in Input Mono, the width and line-height of which are changeable. There are also non-monospaced sans and sans-serif forms available.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Customizable
Many letter-forms are available in Input Mono, the width and line-height of which are changeable. There are also non-monospaced sans and sans-serif forms available.
Pro Great on small-sized, high-resolution screens
Input Mono is designed to look good on HiDPI and low-resolution screens of variable zoom levels.
Pro Free for private use
Pro Large punctuation
The punctuation symbols are larger than in other traditional fonts, making for greater visibility.
Pro Non-monospaced sibling fonts
In addition to the monospaced variant, the Input family of fonts includes serif and non-serif proportional font families.
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 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.