I think the font is decent, but I won't use it in its current iteration for the following reasons:
1. The lowercase 'm' is muddled and looks bad without anti-aliasing, downright horrible with anti-aliasing.
2. The lowercase 'k' is "too unique" and distracting (personal taste)
3. The lowercase 'e' is too squished and doesn't read well at small point sizes.
Overall, this font is not horrible. But with every "programmer-centric" new font that gets a bit of buzz, I always end up going back to non-anti-aliased Monaco within a day or two. It just seems like one of those perennial non-problems people keep having a go at.
Agree with your assessment. I searched high and low for a font that serves as a programming font for quite a while. For the longest time I loved Inconsolata and some of it's variations. After a while I got tired of it though. It seemed... sloppy, even though I loved it at first. I think what it lacked, for me at least, was consistency between glyphs. Some where straight and angular, while others curved and it just didn't fit. Now I have settled on DejaVu Sans Mono and it seems to be working for me. It's very balanced and the glyphs are very evenly spaced and take up pretty much the same visual foot print for each glyph. Highly recommend.'
This font that OP is showcasing isn't terrible, for a first pass, but there are some problems (funny lower case f curve really bugs me. It's overly pronounced) that need to be ironed out.
I prefer when the font is rather thick than thin, which leads to using sizes like 14, and I've found that Lucida Console and DejaVu Sans Mono work best for me.
The former in Notepad++, the latter is perfect for Eclipse, because Eclipse has a very small spacing between the lines (not configurable) and many other fonts look too condensed due to that.
I've actually started using Deja Vu Sans Mono for a programming font. There are definitely still some annoyances but it does seem to do better than most I've come across.
1. The lowercase 'm' is muddled and looks bad without anti-aliasing, downright horrible with anti-aliasing. 2. The lowercase 'k' is "too unique" and distracting (personal taste) 3. The lowercase 'e' is too squished and doesn't read well at small point sizes.
Overall, this font is not horrible. But with every "programmer-centric" new font that gets a bit of buzz, I always end up going back to non-anti-aliased Monaco within a day or two. It just seems like one of those perennial non-problems people keep having a go at.