After a long search that went through what seemed like just about every page in Google's index, I finally found a great linux programming font! The emacs folks have some good advice.
Before I share it, let me say that good fonts are a necessity for programming. Bitmap fonts win the day on Linux because while anti-aliasing is neat, it's just harder to design a good curve-based font than a good bitmap font. I think part of the problem is that the font rendering systems in Linux are invariably moving targets, and you really need to design curve-based fonts with the specifics of the rendering system in mind if they're going to look great at the end. Consolas on Windows is great, but they designed it specifically for ClearType.
On the other hand, if someone designs a bitmap font system that allows the author to specify the antialiased pixels and integrates it into X, that might be worth using.
Anyway, the font is Neep. You can get it here. Jim's hosting seems to be broken, but the link to the mirror download is still working.
As for loading it... Well. The current situation with bitmap fonts in Ubuntu/Debian is a bit strange: they're basically disabled to ensure that old bitmap Xfonts (like Times) don't show up in webpages and make everything ugly.
Frankly I could care less about web fonts so I just tell Firefox to force my fonts and enable bitmap fonts wholesale. Instructions are available here. Incidentally, MonteCarlo (the font mentioned on that page) is pretty good, but Neep is better. Try both and I think you'll agree.
For gVim purposes you may want one of these two lines:
set guifont=Neep\ Medium\ Semi-Condensed\ 10 set guifont=Neep\ 10
Semi-Condensed lets you cram in a ton more columns and the regular characters look great, but bold characters will look funny and run together. C'est la vie.
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