What font do you use for your xterm or where you need a fixed pitch font?
Submitted by ajt on Sun 17 Feb 2008
| Courier/Courier New |
   30% | 185 votes |
| Andale Mono |
3% | 19 votes |
| Monaco |
4% | 30 votes |
| Lucida Console/Typewriter |
14% | 87 votes |
| Freefont Mono |
8% | 53 votes |
| Bistream Vera Sans Mono/Deja Vu Sans Mono |
39% | 240 votes |
| Total 614 votes |
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On my YaKuake terminal I'm running Monaco.
My historical favourite fixed-pitch font has been Lucida Console/Typewriter, but it's missing a marked zero so I don't tend to use it any more.
On my PuTTY sessions at work I currently use Andale Mono (from MS CoreFonts) and I've used that now and then for a console or programming environment.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:LowercaseA.svg
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--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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After reading all your comments about Terminus, I decided to test it out and installed the terminus package on my Debian.
I understood that Terminus is a raster font, like the other X11 fonts. In fact I found its declaration in the file /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/fonts.alias.
But if I try to use it in a terminal this is what happens:
$ rxvt -fn 'x:terminus-12' urxvt: unable to load base fontset, please specify a valid one using -fn, aborting.
The only way to use it is to specify it as TrueType, like in:
$ rxvt -fn 'xft:Terminus'
Does this make sense? Am I forced to pass through the xft engine to render a raster font?
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#!/bin/bash
#
# rxvt [_$size]
prog=$(basename $0)
size=${prog#*_*}
export FONT="-xos4-Terminus-Medium-R-Normal--16-160-72-72-C- 80-ISO8859-1"
if [[ $size == "big" � 93; ] ; then
export FONT="-xos4-Terminus-Medium-R-Normal--20-200-72-72-C- 100-ISO8859-1"
elif [[ $size == "tiny" ] ] ; then
export FONT="-xos4-Terminus-Medium-R-Normal--14-140-72-72-C- 80-ISO8859-1"
fi
term="/usr/bin/rxvt"
if [[ $prog == "mrxvt" & #093; ] ; then
term="/usr/bin/mrxvt"
fi
$term -ls -bg black -cr green -fg&n bsp;white -C -fn $FONT -sl 500 &
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cb
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--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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I've used raster fonts in the past but I find them hard to read and they never seem to be the right size. Which is not to say that I don't think there is a place for them or that I wouldn't use one if I liked it.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
[ Parent ]
[ Send Message | View dkg's Scratchpad | View Weblogs ]
I use a 1024x768 video console every day on my trusted physical console, and i do most of my work in shells and editors. I like to pack as many characters on the screen as possible. I've always preferred raster (a.k.a. "bitmapped") fonts at low pixel counts because of their crispness.
This poll is a good push to get me to re-examine the available scalable options, though. terminus is pretty nice (and can actually pack more rows of text on a screen than my beloved fixed fonts at similar character width), but it seems to lack a bold, which makes me reluctant to switch to it.
Or am i misunderstanding how to get it to display bolded? I'm launching my terminal like this:
rxvt -fn 'xft:Terminus:pixelsize=6x12'
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I recognize that in the abstract, the best scenario would be pixels with a fine enough pitch to be indistinct to the naked eye, and scalable fonts for everything. But i don't think we're there yet, and i prefer to work with tools that seem appropriate to my current technological situation.
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Roll on the availability of 300dpi screens. Modern TFT screens in the mass market segment are no better, in some cases worse than decent CRT displays of a decade ago!
It's not uncommon to find a laser printer able to print at 1200dpi, yet most displays are still stick at a feeble 100dpi or less. My TFT screen at home runs at just under 100dpi - the same as my previous CRT, my work display (TFT) is only 85dpi.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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I'm going to have my headstone carved in the terminus font.
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But it's not Unicode, despite what's been advertised in its home page since 2000: I'm working hard to convert all these fonts to Unicode (also knows as the Universal Character Set or ISO-10646 encoding). Markus Kuhn has been a big help. Version 4.0 should be finished soon. Thanks for your patience!
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If you want to check them out, look here:
http://daniel1992.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/fonts-in-ubuntu/
I use them for all of my fonts in Ubuntu.
Droid seems to be love it or hate it, based upon the reaction of my friends.
The samples pdf is here:
http://www.ascendercorp.com/pdf/Droid_fonts.pdf
Take a look, you might like them.
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It is important to clearly see the difference between "o O 0" and "1 l L |", some typefaces make this easy others do not.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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I hate the default sans serif fonts on both Ubuntu and Palm OS for exactly that reason - i have to cut & paste to a fixed window to see what's going on.
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Two notes: (1) Times New Roman, popular on X-servers, is perhaps the worst choice possible. (2) If you must submit reports or papers in 12-point Courier, try 13-point Souvenir instead. (It's much more elegant & readable, and the words a page are about the same as Courier's.) How many decent publishers (this means not Springer) have ever used a fixed-width typeface?
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Seriously, i've never tried to change it from the default on Ubuntu, and i'd really like to know how i can make rxvt use the same font, because it's a much more configuration-driven terminal than gnome-terminal.
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You can specify what fonts you want rxvt to use with the `-fn` option:
rxvt -fn 'xft:Terminus'If you want to change the defaults, you should add lines to ~/.Xresources. This file is sourced during a standard X11 session startup on ubuntu and debian systems from /etc/X11/Xsession.d/30x11-common_xresources, but can also be re-loaded from the command line with xrdb.
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rxvt: can't load font "xft:Terminus"
(Ditto for xft:Monospace, too.)
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You can also dig around inside the directories that the fonts reside, there is often a fonts.scale file that contains all the various mapping details.
There may even be a smarter way to do this but I don't know it.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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--
Anurag
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The best I have seen is the default font on Konsole. Nothing else comes close from what I have seen on several operating systems, though I haven't looked extensively, if it works well I'm not going to switch , I'm fussy enough as it is.
Peter
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