I took a good look at JetBrains Mono and was really impressed. It starts with the principles of Consolas and strives to improve readability and usability by:
- Using the pixel grid more effectively
- Increasing the height of lower-case letters
- Distinctive symbols and letters (so “1”, lower-case “L” and upper-case “I” look distinct)
They also have special ligatures for typical coding conventions like comments, Greater-than-equal-to, etc.
It’s a really, REALLY good-looking font and I can’t wait to install it and use it.