When comparing Fira Code vs SF Mono, the Slant community recommends Fira Code for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Fira Code is ranked 5th while SF Mono is ranked 48th. The most important reason people chose Fira Code is:
This is particularly beneficial for those who wish to use combined letters such as "æ" and other diphthongs. But when it comes to programming, the ability to scan through your code is improved with ligatures for equality, arrow functions, and more.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Has ligatures
This is particularly beneficial for those who wish to use combined letters such as "æ" and other diphthongs. But when it comes to programming, the ability to scan through your code is improved with ligatures for equality, arrow functions, and more.
Pro Good editor support
A list of supported editors and terminals can be found here.
Pro Supports retina displays
Fira Coda supports high pixel density retina displays.
Pro Installs easily on Mac
Many ligature fonts on Github aren't "mac ready". This font comes pre-compiled and ready to install on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Pro Frequent updates
The repository is frequently updated.
Pro Clear and dis·tin·guish·a·ble
Code is very readable at both big and small sizes.
Pro Beautiful with high pixel density
Cons
Con Ligatures are nice-looking but harm clarity
Even though the font combines characters into ligatures, you still need to type the normal characters, and the ligatures make that difficult in many cases.
Con Dotted zero is less readable than slashed zero
FiraCode uses dotted zero instead of slashed zero which is less readable.
Con Needs support for ligatures
It can't work in plain terminal, must have built in support for ligatures in editor
Con No Sublime Text support
Not the font's fault but even the latest Sublime Text builds (e.g. 3126) don't support ligatures.
Con Slightly difficult to use outside of Xcode, Terminal, or Console
The typeface isn't available in Font Book etc unless the user imports the files embedded in the apps above.