Hi all.
Recently I’ve switched to proportional fonts for programming, and have been looking for font choices, but find I’m missing some vocabulary.

There was a post on variable width fonts for coding here: http://typophile.com/node/13090
But aside from a few choices, I couldn't glean how to look for good fonts.

Here are the characteristics I’m looking for:
0 - The font needs to work well at small sizes and coarse resolutions.
1 - The lowercase L and number 1, as well as capital i, need to be distinct at small sizes. Same with zero and o (upper and lowercase).
2 - Punctuation needs to be prominent. A period and a comma mustn’t be confused. Same with primes and hatches. (Helvetica and Fira Sans crash and burn here).
3 - Brackets, braces and parenthesis need room to breathe. It should be easy to select a single one out of a sequence with the mouse.
4 - The dot in the lowercase i needs to be visible at small sizes. Or at list, lowercase i and l need to be visibly different.
5 - Good line spacing, as text editors typically don't offer adjustment of leading.

Are there names for any of these criteria? Or any general classification or help to find font families that match well?

I notice that Bitstream fonts (and Verdana and Georgia) generally do better than fonts from other foundries when it comes to braces, brackets, punctuation. Why is this so? Why do most foundries squash these characters?
I also notice that a lot of sans serifs are directly disqualified by criterium 1. Why is it so popular to make letters look like each other? Isn't this bad for readability?

What are others using? Some of my findings below.

Good fonts I've found:
* Verdana is very good, and unmatched in giving room to braces, brackets and punctuation. But its lowercase i can be confused with an l at small sizes (an artifact of antialiasing and small pixel count, but still).
* Bitstream Vera Serif: the Sans fails distinguishing i, L, one. Vera Serif is pretty good, but its large x-height and small line spacing make it uncomfortable for me.
* Charter: very good in all respects. Perhaps the best overall.
* Input family: I like the idea of it, but like Vera, the spacing and x-height combine to make it unusable for me.
* Adobe Source Pro family: the Mono is the best monospaced font I know. The serif fails by compressing brackets, braces, parens.