IMO they are far from indistinguishable (maybe you are thinking about Menlo?). I find Akkurat Mono more pleasant to use. DejaVu Sans Mono looks too dense compared to Akkurat Mono's softer looks.

Here is a side by side comparison: http://cl.ly/image/1j030D031g0U/o

Since people seem to care about it, I should also note that it has a nice slashed zero you can see on line 6 which I prefer to DSM's dotted counterpart.

Edit: Here's how it looks like when I adjust DSM's line-spacing to match Akkurat Mono's default, it still has that busy look: http://cl.ly/image/1z3Z393x1s3l/o

Busy look? Akkurat Mono is simply more squat and tight; look at the "a" and "e", for example. For me, it gives a gnarly, squinting kind of look reminiscent of Courier New, compared to Deja's more rounded openness.

Here's an animation comparing them (Deja is the bigger one, Akkurat the squat one): http://i.imgur.com/lkOzDWN.gif

I really dislike Akkurat's bloated commas and semicolons, the exaggerated "+" (which has not enough spacing, either), and the shallow braces are not good, they look like parantheses.

The only thing I like about Akkurat, I have to say, is the less classical "&". Deja uses the "et"-style ampersand, which looks unfinished at the kind of code sizes used for programming.

But each to his own, I guess.

And that slashed zero is an Ø [1], my friend, not a zero. :-)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ø

Fair points all around (though I disagree with all of them except "+" being exaggerated). DejaVu's characters are a bit too tall for my taste, a clear example of this is the oval 'o' character. I also like to have a pronounced difference in the height of lower case and upper case letters.

Since we are doing character by character comparison I find "="s of DejaVu too wide (which causes "===" to look bad). It's "<" and ">" are too tight which makes it look bad when used as angle brackets. Backticks are slimmer, lower case "L" looks out of place and (apparently) it doesn't have an italic "*" (I don't know if Akkurat Mono is supposed to have it but it looks nice).

I don't get the point you are trying to make about slashed zeros. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashed_zero

It all boils down to personal preference, thanks for stating yours :). You might also like Liberation Mono, which is my second favorite.

I guess you pinpointed one reason I like Deja so much: The x height of its lowercase letters is slightly higher than the median line.

In other words, the x height is higher than the middle stroke in capital "E" (or "F", "A", etc.). The reason I like this is because code uses mostly lowercase letters (unless you write COBOL), and if you keep the x height classically aligned, the font ends up looking squat and gnarly, like Akkurat.

Deja exaggerates the x height by (in display terms, at the point size that I use) two pixels, which evens it out and "fills out" the line height more nicely, making for a more harmonic flow, even though this also means the middle strokes of some capital letters don't line up with the tops of the lowercase letters. (This is not a violation of typography rules, by the way.)

Fonts like Akkurat, with classical x heights, look more sparse because lines with only lowercase letters leave more room above the x height, and the difference in height between lower and upper case is more pronounced.

Anyway.

I agree that Deja's angle brackets are a bit too angled. Akkurat's is better.

The problem with Deja's "=" is not the length but the spacing. It has the same spacing issue as Akkurat's "+".

However, I categorically reject your criticism of Deja's lower-case "L". It's perfect because it looks precisely like the character L, whereas Akkurat's "l" looks like the number 1. (It's also consistent with the overall shape of the font, matching the arcs in characters such as f and j.)

I was jesting about the 0/Ø. I don't care whether there is a center dot or a slash myself.

Looked at Liberation, but it's not for me. Too... squished.

> The problem with Deja's "=" is not the length but the spacing. It has the same spacing issue as Akkurat's "+".

Doesn't it become a length problem when we are talking about a fixed-width font though?

Thanks for elaborating, you obviously know more about typography than I do! I don't have much reasoning behind my choice of font apart from personal taste.

I just took another look at Liberation Mono for the first time in years and it is eerily similar to Akkurat Mono which probably explains why I like both of them so much.

> Doesn't it become a length problem when we are talking about a fixed-width font though?

When drawn on its own with a space before and after, the length itself is not the problem, but of course in a monospace font, character_spacing = (character_width - actual_width_of_glyph), so you are right in that respect. Semantics. :-)

In my experience it's nicer than DSM on the Mac.

What Theme is this?

My tweaked version of Monokai: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12091499/Share/Monokai%2....