There must be a lot of programmers in here. And apparently a fair number of programmers like to use proportional fonts (faster to read). But I've never found one which has unique characters (eye, ell, one), which is an absolute for programming. There must be one out there somewhere. Do I really have to make my own?

Answered at Einstein@home and you mean mono spaced.

L l - ell 
I i - eye 
1 - one 
| - pipe

these all look unique to me with no confusion, and all are mono-spaced. pretty standard.

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Funny... when doing 1 and l (lower case ell) just in an answer window, it shows as:
1 l

But when doing it in a code container, the l looks similar to the 1.

 1 l

Why does the code container have a different font than the rest of the forums?

Funny... when doing 1 and l (lower case ell) just in an answer window, it shows as:
1 l

But when doing it in a code container, the l looks similar to the 1.

 1 l

Why does the code container have a different font than the rest of the forums?

I dunno, it seems totally normal to me that something in tags would have the standard mono spaced "code" font. I'm sure it's just a stylistic choice since the normal "non code" font of the forums just looks more polished and not so robotic and dated. I'm going to guess that the forum is using Courier New for stuff inside code tags. this font has been around for ages.

i dont think the "l" and "1" look similar at all. easy to see that they are different in my opinion. but Peter asked for unique, and they are objectively unique.

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Why does the code container have a different font than the rest of the forums?

The code container uses a fixed-width font - every character is giver the same width - which makes it easier to line up indents / columns / numeric tables.

Proportional fonts, as the OP requested, make it much harder to do that.

iiiiiiiiii
wwwwwwwwww

iiiiiiiiii
wwwwwwwwww

programmers care about mono spaced so that things line up well. makes it easier to read and understand. you wont find any programmers who want proportional.

you're unlikely to misunderstand which letter is supposed to be which in normal proportional fonts if you use simple reasoning and context clues.

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Trouble is, I can't get my browser to override the web page fonts. Is this possible?

depends on the browser and what preference choices are available. but watch out for turning it into gibberish

Why would it turn it into gibberish?

Different special character sets for one.

The proportional font is a font where each character occupies only as much width as it needs. A monospaced font is a font where each character occupies the same amount of space on a horizontal line of text. Also, you can download amazing fonts from here: https://blogwithjoy.com/free-unique-fonts/.