On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 12:14 AM, Tobias Dammers <tdammers@gmail.com> wrote:

Well, there's only so many monospace fonts that are beautiful,

reasonably unicode-complete, easy on the eyes, programming-friendly AND
free (-ish).

Not really quite so true: I easily came across about a dozen that are readily available, and many systems have several of these pre-installed. (Though one's defiinition of Unicode complete might affect this). And yet, just four fonts make up over 75% of the sample - and two of those are essentially identical!

Also, the default for the most popular terminal emulators
on Linux (e.g. xterm, rxvt) is actually a bitmap font.

Unclear if those are the most popular terminal emulators on linux any more. The screen shots I received say otherwise: I can only tell the terminal emulator in about half of them - but again only 15% have a bitmap font.

Controversial topic there, tread carefully ;) . Lots of folks are borderline
militant when it comes to their terminal fonts, whether they're
bitmapped or not.

Again, I'd say the sample doesn't bear that out. The samples with console fonts showed no signs of customization, and so one might infer that it is more likely that people are using them because they just came that way (and/or changing it is too difficult for the perceived benefit.)

Also, white-on-black vs. black-on-white seems to be an
emotionally-charged question.

This seems true, and really baffles me. White (or green) on black makes sense on mono-chrome CRT devices with very low resolution: The lit pixels "bloom", and so a single pixel wide line of lit pixels is wider than a single pixel wide line of unlit pixels in a field of lit ones. Hence, small black characters on white (or green) would become anemic. Once you start using higher resolution, color CRT (which have less blooming), or LCDs (which have almost none), this reasoning makes no sense.