Several others here have suggested my favorite font already, the standard 6x13 "Fixed" bitmap font.
Pretty much every Linux machine has a version of this, but most modern Debians (and probably others) that ship with fontconfig have bitmapped fonts turned off by default for programs that use fontconfig for their font info (i.e., not xterm, but gnome-terminal, usually gvim, et cetera).
If you want to use Fixed and other bitmapped fonts and they're just not there, take a look in /etc/fonts/conf.d for a file named (something like) 70-no-bitmaps.conf, a symblink to the same filename in /etc/fonts/conf.avail. If you remove the symblink from /etc/fonts/conf.d and instead
I tried Inconsolata briefly in my xterm window but ... I don't know, I didn't like it. I guess it's a subjective thing, but I dislike anti-aliased font, I prefer the crisp look of my fixed bitmap font. :-)
since I don't have a stackoverflow account I'll respond to your secondary question... IntelliJ / PhpStorm /etc allow you to enter a custom line spacing. (Plus PhpStorm is a great environment for web project development work)
My desktop's monitor is about 100 dpi and it looks fine. I have a laptop with a 125dpi screen and a netbook with a 150dpi screen, and it looks fine there, too.
Just tried it under a Debian chroot on my phone (N900) and it was tiny but very readable on the 250DPI screen as well.
As this is entirely subjective, the answer for some people might be that it's unusable above 75dpi, while for me it's fine up to >3x that.
Pretty much every Linux machine has a version of this, but most modern Debians (and probably others) that ship with fontconfig have bitmapped fonts turned off by default for programs that use fontconfig for their font info (i.e., not xterm, but gnome-terminal, usually gvim, et cetera).
If you want to use Fixed and other bitmapped fonts and they're just not there, take a look in /etc/fonts/conf.d for a file named (something like) 70-no-bitmaps.conf, a symblink to the same filename in /etc/fonts/conf.avail. If you remove the symblink from /etc/fonts/conf.d and instead
fontconfig will cache bitmapped fonts for you. Then you'll just have to get it to update your cache with and you should be able to use bitmapped fonts like Fixed.You can look for other bitmapped fonts on your system with
which prints out the family name and the sizes for which the bitmaps are available. makes gvim look precisely like a terminal for me.