My workaround was a editing a font with a much longer space char and with a 1/3 of a space of left padding on uppercase letters.
https://github.com/ericfortis/verdanacamel
The problem is that it looses tabular alignment, so I wrote an IDE plugin for tabularizing some blocks.
https://github.com/ericfortis/tabular-eye
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Similar to my font, emacs has a plugin that adds a little underscore.