When comparing DEC Terminal Modern vs M+ 1 Code, the Slant community recommends M+ 1 Code for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” M+ 1 Code is ranked 8th while DEC Terminal Modern is ranked 78th. The most important reason people chose M+ 1 Code is:
This is a non-copyleft license that has minimal requirements regarding redistribution of the software.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Great looking retro font.
I use 18-point DEC Terminal Modern for interacting with OpenVMS systems, with anti-aliasing and subpixel anti-aliasing. With a dark background and a soft white, amber, or green foreground, it's very reminiscent of the physical terminals, though I don't actually have one for comparison.
Unless you want an ultra-retro "rasterized" appearance, I would recommend it by far over either "Glass TTY VT220" or "VT220-mod".
A very slight "con" is that it doesn't work well with at least some of iTerm2's built-in Powerline glyphs. Spaces appear as filled blocks, for example.
Pro Interesting look
The look of DEC Terminal Modern is somewhat retro-inspired.
Pro Permissive free software licence
This is a non-copyleft license that has minimal requirements regarding redistribution of the software.
Pro Narrow font is great for teaching
M+ 1m allows you to fit much more code on slides yet still have them be highly legible, making it a great choice for teaching.
Pro 17 different character-encodings available
- ISO-8859-1, Latin-1 Western European
- ISO-8859-2, Latin-2 Central European
- ISO-8859-3, Latin-3 South European
- ISO-8859-4, Latin-4 North European
- ISO-8859-5, Latin/Cyrillic
- ISO-8859-7, Latin/Greek
- ISO-8859-8, Latin/Hebrew
- ISO-8859-9, Latin-5 Turkish
- ISO-8859-10, Latin-6 Nordic
- ISO-8859-13, Latin-7 Baltic Rim
- ISO-8859-14, Latin-8 Celtic
- ISO-8859-15, Latin-9 A revision of 8859-1
- ISO-8859-16, Latin-10 South-Eastern European
- T1 Encoding, Default 8-bit encoding in many TeX installations
- Windows-1252, Used by default in the legacy components of MS Windows
- WGL4, Pan-European character set defined by Microsoft
- VISCII, Vietnamese standard character set
Pro Five weights from Thin to Bold
The five font weights available are thin, light, regular, medium, and bold.
Pro Works well with Japanese
The widths are half that of the Japanese characters in the font.
Pro High legibility
M+ M Type-1 (1M) was created to emphasize the balance of natural letterform and high legibility.
Cons
Con Top narrow
Con Certain pseudo-graphic characters take two spaces
In this font, some pseudo-graphic characters can take up two spaces instead of one.