So far, there were only two fonts suitable for IDEs such as Visual Studio, Courier New and Lucida Console. There's a third choice now. Go grab Consolas Font Pack for Visual Studio 2005 now. You can see differences between three fonts from Glen Gordon's blog.
Installing the font pack will automatically change the default font for Visual Studio to Consolas. I also changed the font for Notepad, Notepad2 and command prompt. Changing the font for command prompt is a bit tricky. If you open the properties window from command prompt, you will only see Lucida Console and Raster Fonts as options. In order to make other fonts appear in the font selection, you will need to make a small registry hack.
* Disclaimer: Don't blame me if you mess up your system while making changes to registries. You should always backup your registry before making changes. *
Open up registry editor (regedit) and browse to the following.
\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont\
Then add a new REG_SZ (right-click -> New -> String Value) with following.
Name: 00Data: Consolas
Or... you can copy below to a new .reg file and just double-click on it to merge the change into your registry automatically.
--------Cut Here (do not include this line) -----Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont]"00"="Consolas"--------Cut Here (do not include this line) -----
Once you are done, restart your system and go back to command prompt property window. You will then be able to select Consolas as a font. If you would like to add another font, just create a new REG_SZ key with extra 0 for the name (000, 0000, 00000, etc).
Frankly, I am not sure whether I like Consolas better than Lucida Console. I guess I will give it a try for a while and see.