Being a software person, a fair chunk of my life is spent before the computer. Which translates to the feeling that I should be very comfortable doing my routing tasks with it - The most common task being reading whats shown on the screen..

I consider that Fonts play a very important role in this. A font for a programmer need not by stylish (like the newspaper fonts) but should have the following properties.

1. It should be fixed width. Some folks may disagree on this when they use some very modern editors. But Readbility when there are nested code blocks is great if the font is fixed width.
2. The font should cleanly identify the difference between similar looking letters of alphabet - Especially l and 1. or 0 and O. imagine the case if your code has variables like var1 and varl and you are trying to debug the code and you need to strain your eyes just to distinguish between l and 1.

My favorite fonts for this reason are:

• SourceCodePro
• Cousine
• Anonymous Pro
• Monaco (available on mac by default)
• Consolas (available on windows 7 by default)

I used all 5 of the fonts above and keep switching between them once in a while - All of them are equally good and way better than many other monospace fonts.

Next important aspect for a programmer is the color scheme. It should not strain your eyes too much. This is a very personal taste ofcourse.

My favories are

• Solarized
• Zenburn