alt Hacker NewsI used to work in my mom and dad's print shop when I was a kid. 6 picas in an inch, 12 points in a pica, and by the time you go home your hands smell like hypo. That should give you an idea of how old I am.
For a kid I was passably good at setting up headlines for paste-up, but I never had to be the one who used an X-Acto Knife.
I'll die on the hill where 2K is better than 4K if your livelihood depends on having to stare at a screen at a distance of 60cm for upwards of 10 hours a day, longer sometimes.
I also think you missed my point about about the anti-aliasing. For various reasons I still use Windows and some of my favorite monospace fonts only exist in the the .FON format. I can emulate the X-Windows experience of using the misc-fixed-medium family and it works just fine for my needs.
I've tried most of the fonts here, but none of them really do it for me: https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads
But if you want to keep going on with the pedantry, have at it. Were you around in the Usenet days?
I agree that on monitors with insufficient resolution ancient bitmap fonts can be sharper, because they are free of artifacts caused by mismatch between the shape of the letters and the pixel grid.
Your problem is precisely that you use monitors with a too low resolution. On monitors with a high enough resolution, you approach the quality of printed paper and you can use monospace fonts that are more beautiful than any bitmap fonts, without being able to perceive the pixels.
The only problem is that big monitors also need a bigger resolution and the combination of big size with big resolution can be expensive.
While for a size of 27" or 32" the 4k monitors can be quite cheap, I believe that at such sizes a 5k resolution is the minimum for good text rendering, and 5k monitors remain expensive.