@dregrad, We don't collect statistics about the number of Geany installs, but Github stats show about 10 clones _per day_ but that doesn't count the number of installs from distro repositories. So we can't compare the number of people who have problems with the number who use Geany. But the number who report problems is I think less than 10 and therefore only likely to be a small proportion of users.
Increasing the default line height setting adds useless spacing between lines for everyone, and that reduces the number of lines, for example for me line spacing of `0;2` reduces the number of lines on screen from 81 to 71, a significant difference thats not necessary here since I'm using a different font where underscores are always visible.
Also `0;2` isn't necessary in all cases, its something that worked for someone who posted it, in many cases `0;1` works, it does here if I change my font to Deja-Vu Sans Mono and `0;0` does not work, but as I said above `0;0` works for my normal Hack font [Unpaid advertisement: Hack is a font designed for code and provides great readability for that].
To summarise if we changed the default setting:
Setting | Who | Result | Fix ----------|--------|----------|----- `0;0` | Majority | Works | None needed `0;0` | Minority | No underscores at some font sizes | Change font or font size or edit `filetypes.common` `0;1` | Majority | Lose lines | Edit `filetypes.common` to get lines back `0;1` | Some of the Minority | Works | None needed `0;1` | Rest of the minority | No or dim underscores | Change font or font size or edit `filetypes.common` `0;2` | Almost everybody | Lose even more lines | The majority for whom less than `0;2` works edit `filetypes.common` to get lines back `0;2` | Very unlucky few | No or dim underscores | Change font or font size or Edit `filetypes.common`
It seems to me that says the current situation works best for the greatest number of users and the default setting should not change.
Perhaps the Ubuntu package should set `0;1` if the distro continues to default to a faulty font so it works for almost all and doesn't impact too negatively on many. @dregad you could ask there.