I think that the Fixedsys font is one of the most legible monospaced fonts for programming. It has zero antialiasing, with vertical lines mostly 2 pixels wide. Close to ideal for current monitor dot pitches, in my eyes (literally). Here is a sample:
After years of Windows at home (for family reasons) and Linux servers at work accessed through Cygwin on Windows (for company policy reasons), with Fixedsys as the shell and IDE font, I have finally decided to switch to Ubuntu at home.
Eclipse and gedit are no problem, they accept a corrected version of the Fixedsys Excelsior TTF font that you can find here at comment #16 (filename: FSEX301-L2.ttf). But the Gnome Terminal only accepts monospaced fonts.
Although Fixedsys Excelsior is essentially monospaced, it contains larger glyphs (mostly for eastern languages), and also some ligatures. Since apparently ALL characters must have the same width for a font to be recognized as monospaced, Fixedsys Excelsior cannot be selected in all those contexts where monospaced fonts are required, including gnome-terminal.
So what is the easiest/cleanest way to use a Fixedsys clone in contexts that only accept monospaced fonts?