When comparing Mononoki vs MonoLisa, the Slant community recommends Mononoki for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Mononoki is ranked 29th while MonoLisa is ranked 54th. The most important reason people chose Mononoki is:
Characters are well-differentiated and render clearly. Punctuation is large and easy to see. All characters are easily distinguishable from other similar-looking characters.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Very legible
Characters are well-differentiated and render clearly. Punctuation is large and easy to see. All characters are easily distinguishable from other similar-looking characters.
Pro Very smooth
This font is smooth and beautiful.
Pro Works on cheap displays
Specifically designed to work well on low resolution displays (in addition to high resolution displays).
Pro Nice italic characters
Pro Works at low pixel sizes
9px +!
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 No ligatures
Con Parenthesis
Asymmetric and too bulbous.
Con Not found by default in any system
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.