Best Monospaced Font I've Ever Used
Tomas Restrepo posted about Anonymous as a monospaced editor font. I'm always interested to see the monospaced fonts people are willing to use.
As with any editing font there are some basic requirements: I don't want quirky, it needs to be legible in 1280+ resolution, it needs to work well with Windows font smoothing.
Beyond that, it should also satisfy a few code-friendly requirements: zero isn't just a skinny 'O', braces and parentheses are wide enough to indicate direction, but not so wide as to be disproportionate, commas are visibly distinct from periods.
Lastly, it usually comes down to screen metrics and general aesthetics. I prefer a taller font and usually work at about 8 or 9 point at a normal dpi (96).
Based upon these criteria, I've used about five monospaced editor fonts in the past 5 years. Courier New, Lucida Concole, Lucida Typewriter Sans, Andale Mono (formerly Monotype.com from some IE4 add-on I believe), and Bitstream Vera Sans.
Courier New, Lucida Console: these are your classics. There's a reason Courier New is the default for virtually anything involving monospaced editing on Windows. In fact, on Linux, it's missed badly, at least on my Gentoo Gnome config. I ended up bringing it over since the existing Couriers stumble a bit (no doubt encouraged on their descent by Linux's font-smoothing). There's a silver lining to the Linux side of the coin though, more on that in a second.
Lucida Typewriter Sans is a subtle change of pace, to me it's a little taller and more legible than Lucida Console. It's a very slight difference, but when you look at these things day-in/day-out, you notice. Andale Mono is close to what I want but a little less legible than the others--it's actually a little large at 9pt, a little small at 8pt. This gets back to the subtlety of the actual metrics: I'm splitting hairs here, but again, when I go blind from eyestrain, whatever monospace font I use is probably what I'm going to mentally see burned into my optical nerves for the rest of my days.
Back to the silver lining: Bitstream open-sourced a number of TrueType fonts to improve Linux fonts/display quality in early 2003. I don't believe there are any restrictions about redistributing them and using them on Windows (well, you can't change the name and you can't sell them standalone).
Included in these fonts is Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. It's basically a very clean monospaced version of Verdana that looks great with my display settings and meets all my basic functional requirements. For my money it's the best monospaced font I've used. If you don't have a Linux distro handy, here's a zipfile containing the font, install them as you would any TrueType font.