I had my phase of looking for <i>the</i> coder's font. I spend some time spent looking at various monospaced fonts advertised as God's gift to coders. That time was, in retrospective, wasted. No font will provide anything more than maybe a few minutes of "yeah, this looks nice" feeling.<p>Nowadays I'm going with the defaults provided by IDEs, text editors, terminal emulators, etc. Choice of font is totally unimportant.
I use Consolas on Windows and Inconsolata on Linux, somewhere around the 9-10 pt size. Basically small enough so that I can get two 120-column+ editor windows side-by-side on a 1920px wide (24") display while big enough to not hurt the eyes over the course of a work day.
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono 10px on a 22" 1680x1050 - It's clean and crisp. Seems to be the only font I'm happy with on both Windows and Mac.<p><a href="http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/ttf-bitstream-vera/1.10/" rel="nofollow">http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/ttf-bitstream-vera/1....</a>
I was using inconsolata at 12 but last week I moved to Menlo and I think I have a new favorite.<p>Menlo it's really similar to Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.
Inconsolata, with varying sizes depending on my mental state. It’s free, pretty and legible.<p>Get it here: <a href="http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html</a>
I use Pragmata 11pt. Yes, it costs money, but given the years I've looked at this font, I think it works out to be pretty cheap :-)<p><a href="http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragma.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragma.htm</a>
peep font: <a href="http://zevv.nl/play/code/zevv-peep/" rel="nofollow">http://zevv.nl/play/code/zevv-peep/</a><p>If anybody has ported this to OSX, please share!