When comparing JetBrains Mono vs Google Noto Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends JetBrains Mono for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” JetBrains Mono is ranked 16th while Google Noto Sans Mono is ranked 102nd.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to use to read
Pro Easy to differentiate l, I, and 1
Pro Broad variety for ligature glyphs
Pro Very beautiful
Pro Four different weights
Pro Simple forms
Free from unnecessary details.
Pro Shape of ovals approaches rectangle
Makes vertical reading easier.
Pro Saves a lot of screen space
Pro The dotted zero looks cool
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 No Slashed version/option for 0 (zero)
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.