A while ago, I used to use the Fixed font, which I very much liked, since it featured a quite decent Unicode coverage, and was available in tiny sizes. Then time passed, I switched systems a few times and it kind of disappeared. Terminus is also nice, but quite bigger (for a given terminal geometry, 60 lines for Terminus, 72 for Fixed).

Today, wondering why some fonts I dropped in ~/.fonts weren't picked up by fc-cache -rv ~/.fonts/, I found out a configuration file was preventing fontconfig from considering them: /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf

Kill it with fire, and tada: Fixed is back!