Re: Finding a font for xterm and zprezto/oh-my-zsh
Re: Finding a font for xterm and zprezto/oh-my-zsh
- Subject: Re: Finding a font for xterm and zprezto/oh-my-zsh
- From: Mike Thornburg <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2015 23:37:49 -0800 (PST)
The old-fashioned X11 bitmap fonts can be listed out using the xlsfonts
command and tried out using the xfontsel command, but these are useless
for finding and displaying most of the fonts you will have on your system.
If you want to list out the TrueType fonts installed in the normal MacOS
locations (fonts suitable for putting into the faceName resource) you
should use the fc-list command. "man xterm" recommends
fc-list :scalable=true:spacing=mono: family
to list the scalable fixed-pitch fonts that you have available, but this
won't display the fonts. You can display fonts by passing the -fa option
to xterm to set the faceName.
I forget what characters are actually available in the default fixed-width
font, but I've noticed that even with fonts that support a wide range of
characters I pretty much need to start up xterm in a UTF-8 locale if I
want to see anything much beyond 7-bit ASCII rendered properly. I
currently set my locale to en_US.UTF-8 before starting xterm.
Mike
On Tue, 10 Nov 2015, Michael Jinks wrote:
Short version: What's the right way to shop for fonts in Apple's X11
environment?
Long:
My terminal is xterm. I know the cool kids use others, but I'm stuck
to X11 and screen/scry, and the other terminals I've tried won't
support that environment.
Recently I started using zprezto (a rewrite of oh-my-zsh). It's great,
but it uses fonts that don't exist in Apple's (X11's?) default
fixed-width font, so characters come up as squares, or worse, control
sequences.
For days now, I've been trying to change the font my xterm uses. So
far I've found where to handle that -- wasn't easy, I'm not all that
well versed in The X11 Way -- but now I'm at the stage of needing to
shop for a font that my shell can use, and I'm stuck. I figure I'm
overlooking something basic.
How do I shop for a character set in Apple's X11 layout? As far as I
can find, there isn't any GUI for it, and the files where the font
tables are stored aren't human readable.
This posting was a life saver:
http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/35320/are-there-any-ways-to-improve-the-font-rendering-in-x11-app-xquartz
...but to demonstrate my ignorance, while adding this to my
.Xresources got me a new font:
XTerm*faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono
*faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono
...it wasn't good enough, the same characters still fail to render.
Okay, next I thought, the same place that holds DejaVu will hold other
fonts to try out, but,
% find /opt/X11 -type f -exec grep -il dejavu {} \;
...comes up empty. I know from past experience that font files don't
really work that way but it was worth a shot...
Clue me up?
Thanks.
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