They went from a terrible font to a bad font. There are so many nice ones [e.g. have a look at https://wesbos.com/programming-fonts/], why not pick one of these? Inconsolata or Menlo would be a big improvement over what they chose now. Missed opportunity, IMHO.
Several of those have proprietary licenses. Menlo is a (afaik proprietary) Apple product derived from Bitstream’s Vera Sans Mono and included with all Macs, Consolas was done by Luc de Groot for Microsoft Windows Vista and Office 2007, etc.
True, that's why I mentioned Inconsolata, which is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, which "is considered free by the Free Software Foundation" and the Debian Project. Not sure what OpenBSD's position on that license is though.
Those are vector fonts. We're discussing bitmap fonts instead.
Nothing surprising about vector serif monospace fonts, since Courier and variations―which likely constitute way over 50% of all use of monospaced fonts―are slab-serif fonts.
I had typography as a subject in school and I would say this font is distinctive, but unlike many distinctive fonts it seems to reach it's distinctiveness not on the cost of readability.
I program myself and I know that terminal fonts have special requirements (e.g. certain characters like 1 and l or O and 0 should be visual distinctive) which this font certainly does reach.
>I program myself and I know that terminal fonts have special requirements (e.g. certain characters like 1 and l or O and 0 should be visual distinctive) which this font certainly does reach.
They also have fixed width and height constrains. In the case of this font the original motivation was to be readable on a LCD panel at 5x8
I think I've seen this font before on HN, and I still think B and 8 are too similar (the 8 is quite blocky and only differs in the left corner pixels).
Nice, this might give me the push I need to try BSD on my Dell Latitude 7370 (the XPS 13's cousin). The 3200x1800 display can be a bit hard to read with a default console font. Not that I spend a whole lot of time in the console outside of a terminal emulator, but it is still fun :)
You can then set it as the default font for all your terminals if you like it.
If terminus is not provided by your distribution, get it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/terminus-font/files/terminus... then ./configure etc. as usual. In the end, you just need to keep the matching psf file that you can then move along your other console fonts.
I feel like I tried this on Arch but it was still too small. I ended up using either the sun font or one of the cyr ones, can't remember. I've since moved back to KDE Neon on that machine, so I can't say for sure. I might pop in a USB stick and give it another go...
I did notice that, and even available in AUR for Arch. I just wasn't sure if their console font format was compatible with "setfont". Looks like I've got some playing to do (although I'd still like an excuse to give OpenBSD a try :))
If you want to try BSD, you might as well try FreeBSD and save a few headaches.
I tried to mimic my Linux shell environment to OpenBSD a few months ago and after a few days, I gave up and used FreeBSD and pretty much accomplished it.
I personally like OpenBSD but the manpower isn't on par with FreeBSD to smooth out the edges I think.
The text sample on the author's site[1] is from Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris, so we can deduce the font's name also refers not to the organ but the other meaning of the word "spleen":
"Melancholy with no apparent cause, characterised by a disgust with everything."
This is an unpopular choice, but I have recently switched all my terminals to the Go Fonts[1], and I couldn't be happier. Those who say that only sans-serif fonts belong in a terminal have been lying to me this whole time.
Not sure if it's my browser, but the dashes in the example are rendered with anti-aliasing below them. That is going to suck after a while, a dash should only have on-off pixels, nothing inbetween.
Nothing wrong with serifs, except that typical monitors are too low resolution to do a good job with them. The sample you linked for example doesn't look good to me.
My Chromebook is about 150 DPI and it makes a world of difference compared to the typical 100 DPI desktop monitor.
I dislike monospace because by definition it has kerning problems. However, alignment problems are usually worse so I still use them in my terminals.
Monospace-serifs are interesting. They seem to ease the kerning problems. I just switch my terminal font from Inconsolata to Gofont Mono. Let's see in a few days how happy I am with it.
How do you make these work in Ubuntu? Tried copying them to /usr/local/share/fonts and running "fc-cache -f -v" it seems to detect them but lxterminal, fontviewer were still unable to find and use them...
It might be, since the console mode still can display graphics, e.g. Tux or the distro logo on boot―afaik it's done via the framebuffer driver. So you'd need to hijack the console mode, draw characters using a TTF-capable library, and output the result to the framebuffer. Haven't heard of anything readymade in this vein, though.
The more pertinent question, however, is “why?”, if you could boot at least bare X and xterm instead.
I'm unaware of tools to directly do this. Many years ago I wrote a tool to load a font with freetype and render it directly to the framebuffer. Would be relatively simple to do the same and dump out a subset as a psf font. Or perhaps even to add this functionality to kbd setfont(8) directly.
Sadly, no one has done a properly licensed, bitmap clone just for OpenBSD console use. It would really make a nice addition to any OpenBSD presentation.
Awesome!
The OpenFirmware font didn't work well at all with tmux sessions, causing artifacts due to it not having the characters for borders and other special characters. It seemed quite limited before.
I don't know if the situation has changed since Spleen was first released [0], but I would desperately hope so as it is ridiculous to default in 2019 to a non-internationalized font, without support for even Latin-based Central European characters, let alone non-Latin alphabets.
> Another short term goal is to add support for Central European languages, with Polish being the immediate priority.
Other than that, looks good and I'm digging the French literary references.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 79.3 ms ] threadI believe this is the relevant font: https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
edit: I'm very stupid and apparently missed the link to this same blog post in TFA. Leaving this here in case someone else makes the same mistake.
https://i.imgur.com/VqBzIWn.png
It is the old Sun console font taken originally from OpenFirmware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIL_Open_Font_License
Though I gotta say, the variable stroke width might be less monotone and taxing on the eyes.
Nothing surprising about vector serif monospace fonts, since Courier and variations―which likely constitute way over 50% of all use of monospaced fonts―are slab-serif fonts.
Meaning another search nightmare and all discussions about this font will need to be tagged "gofont" or similar. Oh well.
The gofont used for the body of that article is very reminiscent of Candara (or is it Nyala?). The monospaced font is surprisingly nice, though!
I program myself and I know that terminal fonts have special requirements (e.g. certain characters like 1 and l or O and 0 should be visual distinctive) which this font certainly does reach.
Other than that it is a question of taste.
They also have fixed width and height constrains. In the case of this font the original motivation was to be readable on a LCD panel at 5x8
I prefer the convention of using a narrow zero to the slashed one in this font though, for exactly this reason.
setfont ter-132n
You can then set it as the default font for all your terminals if you like it.
If terminus is not provided by your distribution, get it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/terminus-font/files/terminus... then ./configure etc. as usual. In the end, you just need to keep the matching psf file that you can then move along your other console fonts.
https://github.com/fcambus/spleen
I tried to mimic my Linux shell environment to OpenBSD a few months ago and after a few days, I gave up and used FreeBSD and pretty much accomplished it.
I personally like OpenBSD but the manpower isn't on par with FreeBSD to smooth out the edges I think.
"Melancholy with no apparent cause, characterised by a disgust with everything."
[1] https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
My eyesight is perfect, yet every time I run across one of these I switch fonts or at least zoom in until the line width seemingly doubles.
I also much prefer large text, even though my vision is pretty good.
[1] https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts
Nowadays I love and only use Iosevka Slab: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka (3rd and 4th panel in the topmost screenshot)
My Chromebook is about 150 DPI and it makes a world of difference compared to the typical 100 DPI desktop monitor.
Monospace-serifs are interesting. They seem to ease the kerning problems. I just switch my terminal font from Inconsolata to Gofont Mono. Let's see in a few days how happy I am with it.
Thanks for the hint.
You can enable them as follows:
The Ubuntu wiki[1] has information about how you can be more specific and only enable a selection of fonts, if you desire.[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Fonts#Enabling_Bitmapped_Fonts
The more pertinent question, however, is “why?”, if you could boot at least bare X and xterm instead.
> Another short term goal is to add support for Central European languages, with Polish being the immediate priority.
Other than that, looks good and I'm digging the French literary references.
[0]: https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/