Very interesting! Thanks for posting this. Sadly I spent too many years in the 60s-90s programming in monospaced fonts and I like it when things Just. Line. Up. Darnit. The wider Ms and Ws are yes, visually appealing, but…
My current monospaced love is Cousine, available free at Font Squirrel (https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/cousine), my usual free font fix site. The really cool thing about the font, aside from the facts that it’s free, and it lines up at 10 chrs/in in 12 pt, and 12 chrs/in in 10 pt. exactly, is that the glyphs are so distinguishable. There is a clear distinction among capital i, lowercase L, numeral 1, and vertical bar. Similarly, capital o and numeral 0 are sharply distinct, as are hyphen, en-dash, and em-dash. The Courier variants suffer from typewriter holdovers because so many old keyboards lacked numeral 1, numeral 0, vertical bar, and had no dash glyph but a hyphen. The sans serif mono fonts vary on this, but Cousine is the best free font I’ve found. The problem glyphs at 12 point:
The distinction among the dash glyphs is wonderful in Cousine. Courier Prime—it’s OK for output for beta readers. I’ll use Ubuntu Mono if I need a condensed font. The others lack bold, italic, and/or bold+italic variants.
Monospaced fans, enjoy! Or try the Duospace font if you’re not as picky as I am…