When comparing Iosevka vs Google Noto Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends Iosevka for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Iosevka is ranked 6th while Google Noto Sans Mono is ranked 102nd. The most important reason people chose Iosevka is:
Iosevka is very clear and legible on all displays and in all sizes.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Readable
Iosevka is very clear and legible on all displays and in all sizes.
Pro Narrow
Narrow character width uses horizontal screen space more efficiently.
Pro Large number of weights
This font comes in seven different weights, ranging from thin and extra-light to heavy.
Pro Great customizability
There is full customization of styles and variants in Iosevka.
Pro Support for Cyrillic and Greek letters
Iosevka is quite flexible in that it supports Cyrillic and Greek letters.
Pro Free and open source
Iosevka is free and open source.
Pro Powerline support
Includes characters for supporting Powerline/Airline for terminals and terminal editors.
Pro Ligature characters look great
Few fonts have a good ligation feature. Ligature characters (such as æ or the German ß) are supported in Iosevka and look just as you'd expect them to.
Pro Several styles available
Many of the common styles are available, including Sans Serif and Slab Serif with normal, bold, italic, and bold italic styles.
Pro IPA Support
IPA is a system containing the sounds of spoken language and includes speech qualities such as intonation.
Pro Easy on user's eyes
Due to it being readable on all types of displays, Iosevka isn't hard on the user's eyes.
Pro Well-maintained
The developer is active and responds to user questions and issues.
Pro Good CJK compatibility
Iosevka integrates CJK characters well, those being characters of the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and occasionally Vietnamese languages.
Pro Also variant with tiny serifs available ("Slab")
For better reading longer texts.
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 Too narrow
Con Must do a custom build to get all ligatures
Con Fewer ligatures than other fonts
Iosevka has a nice ligation set, but it doesn't have as many ligatures as fonts like Hasklig, Monoid, or Pragmata Pro.
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.