I find that it looks better than Crystal, Andale Mono or Lucida Console at 7pt, and it doesn't looks horrible when bold or italic effects are applied to it.

My only caveat is that it is an older font, and it is missing several international characters from it's map.

Runner up would have to be IBMPC.

I was looking for information on this about a year ago on this subject and found a discussion on the subject at typographi.ca . Now at typographi.com .

It's a fun place to poke around and learn about fonts.

Personally I like ProFont.

ProFont has some nice features, like the fact that ()[]{}/\ are all a good deal taller than uppercase letters. It is awfully wide though.

But the one fatal flaw is that it when typing an "o" followed by a slash it results in an ø. I think a similar thing happens when typing a "n" followed by a twiddle. This is specifically in the "Terminal" app in Mac OS X.

I would be eternally grateful if someone could tell me how to turn that particular "feature" off.

The runners up follow:  

3.  Andale Mono
4.  Courier New
5.  Lucida Sans Typewriter Mono

Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreading created a font specifically for proofreading documents. It is designed so that i, l and 1 look different, 0, o and O are easily distinguished, etc.

I find it helps with proofreading things on DP quite a bit. I never thought of using it for programming, but I may try it and see how it works out.

The only reason you give is 'alignment', but what do you need to align? Left-hand edges will align well whatever font you use (especially with tabs for indentation), and IME unless you're writing in COBOL, trying to align anything else is a waste of effort.

I know this is a minority viewpoint, but I find proportional fonts much easier on the eye for code as well as for English text. They don't waste space around thin characters, which leaves more room for the important stuff. Your eye doesn't get drawn to incidental details, but flows easily across the whole.

My favourite general-purpose font is Optima, as I find it gives the best compromise of legibility and density at a wide variety of sizes. And to help code legibility, I tend to write it similar to English, with spaces around operators, after command and semicolons, &c -- I find this helps in most languages.

<dir>/usr/local/pfonts</dir>

What I would like to see is a one large sample, with proper Photoshop smoothing. Then a small group of sizes--perhaps 8px-13px. Then a group for no smoothing, and then for smoothing/anti-aliasing on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

But Really
The entire software development industry really needs to move into the twenty-first century and learn how to use fonts and sizes and who knows, sounds, to provide information to the programmer. We have been conditioned to use monospace fonts purely to provide consistent indentation for nested conditionals (if statements). If you think about it, consistent indentation is achieved in word processors all the time with various fonts and colors.

The highlighting and fonting (especially of strings and comments) in most text editors needs the drastic hand of a graphic designer to help the software programmers understand their code.

Compilers are currently built for handling straight text without annotations but stripping out the fonting and coloring is easy.

Current text editors keep the text in a plain-text format and add in the visual clues based on a scan of the text. This has merit as text is and should be moved around. There are text editors that will provide syntax-directed font-sizes as well syntax-directed coloration. See Source Dynamics for a good commercial implementation. There is a free download of a trial-period version available.

The work that has been done in literate progamming has not been brought into the mainstream, even by Microsoft. This is interesting because Microsoft has a very vested interest in providing the most competitive software development tools and billions of dollars with which to develop them.

Could also be that I've been hacking with such a display for about the last five years now, but I still cannot imagine myself using any font that didn't allow for a column count in the upper nineties with a window 640 pixels wide.

My previous favourites include Lucide Typewriter, some Courier and some that you don't list.

Traditionally I had one more restriction placed by the windowing system - font without anti-aliasing.

Nowadays you could expand that to require an outline[-based] font to include bitmaps (in N levels of grayscale) for small pixel sizes (none of my machine do).

The real problem I had with SciTE was that even monospace fonts (Lucida Console, for example) were misaligned when you used bold text in the syntax highlighter. Instead of enforcing the character cell width, it widened, thus misaligning columns.

Eclipse has the same problem.

"We use vi, son. They use emacs."

-- "You're not as big an asshat as everyone seems to think." - Kurosawa Nagaya.

I.E. Design your own font. I did. Now everything that annoyed me about terminal fonts (like the similarity of l and 1 or 0 and O) are fixed, my apostrophes look like apostrophes, my backtic is a true reversed apostrophe, my asterisk is large and clear and centred, my carat is legible, my at is normal character size, my curly braces are easily differentiated from my parentheses (even in 1600 x 1200,) my vertical bar is extra visible, my tilde is closer to the top of the character space than the middle and is clearly a squiggle, and my colon lines up properly with my parentheses.

Right Hand

Left Hand