Choosing font for displaying source code

What comes to programming — I've been happy with the default font settings of IDEs like Eclipse or NetBeans. However, one day I had to get a summation operator (capital sigma, Σ) to work in a Java source code. It is not a Latin1 character and I changed the source code encoding to UTF-8.

Now comes the font part of the issue: NetBeans default font, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, doesn't support capital sigma and after changing the source code encoding to UTF-8, the sigma character was still displayed as an empty rectangle.

So, I changed the default source code font to Courier New and voilà — everything was fine... except one thing: Courier New does not look good.

So, I tried all the monospaced fonts installed in my Kubuntu Karmic desktop and ended up to choose DejaVu Sans Mono as my programming font. It supports capital sigma and looks good. The best competitor for it was Liberation Mono but in my eyes DejaVu looks more readable.