I guess platform/rendering engine difference should be taken into consideration when choosing the "best" fonts. Same font is usually rendered very differently on different platforms with anti-aliasing on. For example, Monaco looks fantastic on Mac, but just so-so on Windows/Linux. (Though for bitmap fonts this seems not a real issue.)
Don't use Vera, use DejaVu. It's the same font, but with many more Unicode characters. (λ looks much nicer after I made the switch.)<p>Link: <a href="http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page" rel="nofollow">http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page</a>
How about the X11 "fixed" font and my favorite - "terminus"?<p>Fixed, by the way is the font you see when you start xterm in most environments. Hold Ctrl and the RMB while the mouse cursor is in a xterm window and you can see it in different sizes
I am a big fan of Anonymous, it is currently my emacs code font.<p><a href="http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymous.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymous.html</a>
It's not mentioned, but I <i>love</i> Pragmata[1]. It's expensive, but gorgeous and very usable. And I stand by what I said about it earlier: <a href="http://twitter.com/yan_i/status/1442859670" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/yan_i/status/1442859670</a><p>[1] <a href="http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragma.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragma.htm</a>
Espresso Mono gets my vote nowadays. Prior to that, I was using Consolas for the prior year or so.<p>I <i>think</i> I used Monaco or Inconsolata before that. Can't really remember.
I used to like Monaco, but its parentheses are kind of annoying if you program in a lisp like language, or if you need to nest a lot of parentheses. Now im using dejavu sans mono.
my favorite programming font (and I think it is a pity that the article doesn't mention it): Envy Code R (<a href="http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-coding-font-released" rel="nofollow">http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-cod...</a>)<p>I just love this font! it's such a beautiful piece of font-design and I only can recommend you to try it out!