日本語

update: fontconfig 2.3.2-4 and higher will disable the use of bitmap fonts by default.
To reenable one must change the symlinks as appropriate in /etc/fonts/conf.d
and restart X before any of the following applies. For e.g. on my ubuntu 5.10 system I did:

sudo su
cd /etc/fonts/conf.d
rm 30-debconf-no-bitmaps.conf
ln -s yes-bitmaps.conf 30-yes-bitmaps.conf

OK I hate antialiased fonts for monospaced apps. I.E. text consoles, text editors, ...
IMHO having a fixed size bitmap font is optimum because the text doesn't need to be an arbitrary size and hence you can just use the human generated representation without any computer generated fuzzies (which granted do help a lot for scalable text, and are less of a problem at higher resolutions).
Also antialiased text is slower (which I tested in gnome terminal by running the following while switching fonts dynamically in "edit current profile").

dd if=/dev/zero | od -Ax -tx1z -v

So to that end, how does one know which font to use? First just monospace fonts won't do as these can be scaled to any size, and hence are antialiased.

$ fc-list ":spacing=mono:scalable=true" family
Luxi Mono
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
Courier 10 Pitch
Nimbus Mono L
Courier

You need to specify scalable=false (or equivalently antialias=false)

$ fc-list ":spacing=mono:scalable=false" family pixelsize
console8x8       8
console8x16      16
Fixed            14,15,16,20,24
Gothi            12,14,16,18
LucidaTypewriter 8,10,12,14,18,19,24
Marumoji         14
MiscFixed        6,7,8,9,10,12,13,14,15,18,20

Right. My favourite from the above is MiscFixed 10. So where to set this in the system?

1. gnome terminal: Start → Preferences → Font → Terminal Font
2. xchat: Settings → Preferences → Interface → Text Box → Font
3. gvim: In ~/.gvimrc do this.

Here's what gnome-terminal (editing this document in vim) looks like in both fixed and scalable: