What is your developer's font when VPN'ing to a remote machine?

Question

Once in a while, I would VPN to my computer at work. I usually use either Consolas or Bitstream Vera Sans Mono on my choice of IDE.

But the problem is that, when remoting into a machine, an ClearType setting is turned off and thus both Consolas or Bitstream Vera Sans Mono look quite terrible and hurt my eyes after an hour or so.

What would be a good temporary fallback font of choice for this scenario?

Answer 1

The standard Courier New is my fallback font when Consolas looks bad.

Answer 2

Andale Mono.

One of the "Core Fonts for the Web" from MS. Was my first choice before Consolas.

Now available from sourceforge.

Answer 3

If you're remoting in to an XP machine via Remote Desktop, you can enable ClearType support on the connection. With XP SP3, you can enable it via a registry modification:

[HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations]
"AllowFontAntiAlias"=dword:00000001

Reboot after doing this. You may also need to edit the remote desktop connection properties and turn on "Font smoothing" under the "Experience" tab.

Note that you can also accomplish this in versions of XP prior to SP3, but it requires a patch to termserv.dll, I believe.