It should be noted that Consolas does not look good at all without ClearType. If ClearType hurts your eyes and you have disabled it (which is the case for me), this font will look pretty crappy.

Thanks for the recommendation though -- I'm always on the lookout for a good console font. So far, I really like Terminal (for ANSI) and VT100 (ships with SecureCRT), but only Lucida Console and Courier New support non-Latin encodings.

True. If you want a good programming/console font that still looks good without ClearType enabled, I recommend DejaVu Sans Mono. I like ClearType myself, so it's not a problem for me.

Consolas beats the pants of off anything I've tried on Windows. Very Monaco-like :)

I just tried this font and it looks awesome, so nice and smooth, love it.

It won't install unless you have Visual Studio installed. Must need to be a recent version too, because I've got an old version on my machine.

To remove the Visual Studio restriction, start setup.exe and wait for the error message. Open you run box and enter %TEMP%. Find the cached MSI file, something like 123ABC12.msi. Copy it to a permanent location. Download and install Orca (Microsoft's Free Windows Installer Editor) from here. Right click the MSI and select 'Edit with Orca'. Find the LaunchCondition Table. Right click the row that shows the restriction (there should be only one) and click 'Drop Row'. Save. Run your MSI without errors. You're Welcome.

Oh noes! b1sh0p, you've just opened yourself (and possibly me) up for litigation under the DMCA! It's too bad I don't care enough to delete your comment. Looks like we're both going to jail.

Consolas in 10 pt looks completely identical to Lucinda Console in 9 pt, except that a few Consolas characters have more of a Courier styling. Open up notepad and compare the above side by side. Very, very trivial difference if you ask me. What am I missing here?

I dunno about you, but I see a huge difference:

(top is Consolas 10pt., bottom is Lucida Console 9pt.)

Maybe I need to adjust my ClearType settings. Indeed, portions of Consolas are much more readable and aesthetically pleasing. Thanks wonko.

There's no need to have VS.NET installed. Get it here. Lucida Console suck wonko's balls actually, try typing 0Oo (zero, uppercase 'O' lowercase 'o'). Lucida Console is NOT identical to Consolas, it's an annoying font if you're doing any kind of programming.

The goggles... THEY DO NOTHING

or it just might be this damn CRT that im using and thankfully dont own

It's the CRT. :P

To date, my favorite is Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Vera), I will give a try to Consolas and see how it competes in Putty and Emacs.

Consolas 9pt FTW!