Comic sans was invented for legibility on CRT screens, and its considered good for younger people to learn the iconography of various Latin characters.
Its just misused since it was standard in Windows and Apple's OS X, and used in situations that aren't meant for such a typeface. It's perfectly good for what it was invented for, its just often incorrectly used by designers who don't really know how to design well.
https://www.codingfont.com/ is a fun, tournament style quiz that compares different monospace fonts. It's far from comprehensive, but I found it useful to gauge what font features I find stylish and readable
That was fun. Apparently I'm a JetBrains Mono user. Of course it might be simply what I'm used to, because I'm a long time IntelliJ user. It wouldn't surprise me if this is already my font.
I picked up a great little test along the way: type the word ill or illegal followed by 100, using a capital I in illegal and mixing an upper case O and a zero in the number.
Ill10O
Can you clearly tell all these characters apart in your editor font?
The I/l and O/o/0, 0/8/ø are all distinct, so are all the different kinds of brackets.
Also, this isn't a monospace font, so wide letters such as m and w are wide, instead of being squashed into an unreadable barcode.
Letters aren't meant to be monospace, and sans TUI nothing in computers still needs to be.
If you do need one, ex. for TUI, I second JetBrains Mono!
Also, Verdana is not a libre font, Noto Sans is a libre font that also has these properties, although code does look much better in Verdana to me.
For example eight spaces are going to be twice as big as four spaces in just about any font, and Verdana still accodomodates well to this with its wide spaces.
Look up a good article on coding fonts and pick your camp!
At the moment I have DejaVu installed but I'm not a purist. As long as it's properly designed for this I'm happy. Ligatures are particularly nifty in some languages but no big deal.
I recall one author picking a font so that the italics would be cursive rather than monospace, so that his comments would look like handwritten notes in the margin, but I never got a chance to try it myself. Looked great though!
I just use IBM Plex, but that's mostly because the keycaps my keyboard came with used it :) I also think it's just fine for readability (i.e. I/l and O/0 are different enough)