Have you tried a finer resolution display, and moving your display further away?

Eye strain will be notably reduced if you move the display 3 feet away from your eyes (requires less convergence and less accommodation), and at that distance 220 ppi starts to have pixels that are close to indistinguishable, even for folks with 20/20 vision.

Personally i sit close to the monitor because i cannot see that far. I could scale things up, but then i lose screen real estate (and a lot of stuff break with non-default scaling, including some of my own programs). I could lower the resolution, but anything non-native looks blurry as hell. For a while i used a 42" TV and while it was nice, it was blurry.

So i get the best results by sitting closer to the monitor. I want to be able to see the pixels and have screen real estate, so i use a 27" 1920x1080 monitor (LG... something, i don't remember the model, although TBH i'd prefer to use a smaller monitor with a smaller resolution, but any panel with a lower resolution than 1920x1080 has awful image quality and personally i see even IPS panels as a step backwards compared to my Sony CRT and cannot wait for OLED panels... hopefully in sane sizes and DPI). I also have a 2560x1440 monitor (Dell U2713HM) which i bought after seeing several artists at a previous job use it and liking the image quality, but i have stopped using it both because things are a bit too tiny for my taste and because in high end games my GPU (GTX 980) starts to struggle a bit unless i lower the settings considerably. Although TBH often i prefer to play games in a window so i can have some stuff still visible around (especially in Window Maker, my WM of choice, which is generally distraction free) and with 2560x1440 i can use 1920x1080 for the window resolution which often matches the UI scale the game uses but with 1920x1080 as the native resolution i need to use something smaller like 1600x900 which often crushes the UI, making it blurry. But that is a small price to play.

But FWIW, i don't mind antialiased fonts even though bitmaps do indeed look much crisper to me too.

What are your favorite fonts?

Personally, I use Terminus in my text editor and terminal. Bitmap fonts just look much crisper and cleaner to me.

I have found that I dislike fonts that have overly squared-off corners, in which all the letters look so uniform. So, I just don't understand the appeal a lot of boutique "programming" fonts like proggy or monoid.

I tend to like monospace fonts with a bit more rounded corners, which to me gives them a bit more "character" (one could almost say quirkyness) and readability.

good examples of this would be Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Monaco and to a lesser extent, Iosevka

Honestly? I always go back to the core MS fonts (Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman, etc...). I even use the Fixedsys typeface when coding. They're usable, familiar, and most importantly, look good at small sizes.

The downside is that an unusual renderings (e.g. Font size 17), they don't look great, but it's a small price to pay.