Damien Guard shows a few other, less well-known monospaced fonts that have potential as programming fonts: Anonymous, Crystal, Onuava and Share Technical Monospaced.

I used Anonymous a few years back for a few months, back when it was a free download from the Microsoft.com site, and found it pretty usable. It was recommended to me back then by Felix Kazsa.

The other three fonts I gave a cursory look but didn't find them too much to my liking. In particular, both Crystal and Onuava are too elongated in the vertical for my taste, and I found the braces and a few other punctuation symbols a bit too skinny.

One common problem with free fonts, by the way (and this is particularly bad with monospaced fonts) is that they usually only offer a very limited set of characters. Now, I don't need the entire unicode charset, but having at least the basic accented characters used in spanish and german is pretty useful, so this is another consideration to keep in mind when selecting a good programming font.

Right now, I'm back on Consolas for general programming, though lately I've been giving a look again at Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, which is stil a pretty usable font all in all. However, I'm using a derivation from this called DejaVu Sans Mono.  Here's an example:

By the way, as far as sans serif fonts go, Deja Vu Sans Condensed shows quite a bit of potential in my humble opinion

I've said in the past I enjoy looking for cool and beautiful fonts, particularly of the monospaced variety. I tried using Monaco (a font recomended by some), and while the font is nice, I found it too tiresome for everyday use, and reverted back to trusty 15pt Consolas.

I recently found out Inconsolata, and it definitely shows potential. It's a little smaller at these sizes than Consolas, but it's a well balanced font, with all the usual programming characters well defined and easy to spot. I particularly like the braces and brackets as they are well positioned. The only significant downside I've seen so far is that the uppercase O is not too different from the 0 (zero).

I'll keep on using it for a while and see how it works out for extended use.

I've always been fascinated by computer fonts. There's a lot to be said for the creativity and the care taken in designing a good, usable font, and some are really beautiful on their own. While browsing around this afternoon, I ran into a page listing some fonts available for free, some of which struck my interest. For example, Gentium looks pretty good to me, even though I'm not usually a fan of serif fonts. Agendia Std looks rather different, more usable for headlines and such, but it's certainly a pretty design. Goudy Sans looks pretty as well.
Two fonts very usable for headlines are Environ and Hattrick SC, which looks very pretty (the website didn't seem to want to open, though).

I've always liked searching around for nice monotype fonts to use with code editors and such, but they are pretty hard to come by... To this date, I still rely almost exclusively on good ol' Lucida Console, or, ocassionally, on Lucida Sans Typewriter.

Looking around this morning, I found one that seem like the type I might get used to, although I'll have to experiment with it a little at first. The font is Anonymous, avaliable here (this one is a truetype font, which is nice).