Terminus, my eyes saver
Every day (almost) I spend long hours in front of computer screen and terminal emulator window. Obviously, it’s not comfortable nor healthy for my eyes at all. So, I decided to try to find a way to help my eyes feeling a little better, so they are not mad at me all the time.
What can I do for you, my little beauties else, besides turning off anti-aliasing and other subpixel rendering features on my machines?
Find a better font!, voices behind my back whispered.
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I found Terminus - the best monospaced terminal font ever. It’s much better than Monaco and any other fonts I’ve tried. Terminus was produced by Dimitar Zhekov and is available under terms of the GNU General Public License. Dimitar is writing on his website:
Terminus Font is designed for long (8 and more hours per day) work with computers.
and I can confirm these words after I’ve been using the Terminus font for a couple of days.
Originally, Terminus is dedicated to be compiled for Unix and X11 Window System, so it’s difficult to make it working well on Mac OS X and Windows systems. Eric Cheng prepared and published TrueType version of the font. There is also available another version of TrueType Terminus created by Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert who reported that Eric’s version did not work well for him. I tested them on my Mac OS X 10.4 with Terminal.app and I don’t see any difference, both versions work well.
Update from tryphon: don’t forget to turn anti-aliasing off, since this is a bitmap font
There used to be a Wiki on Eric’s website with more information about terminal fonts and the Terminus. Unfortuantelly, due to spam attacks Eric had to close it. In order to save Eric’s and Simons’ great work, I decided to pack these fonts together and mirror here: terminus-font.tar.gz
I hope it will help someone to make his eyes happy :-)

November 13th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Great Tip, Mateusz, thanks
it works even for the eyes of a little green man
November 13th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
I’m glad you’ve found it helpful.
December 15th, 2007 at 3:33 am
:-(
not working with my Leopard install
December 15th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Lorenzo, good to know. I’ve not upgraded my Mac to Leopard yet. Perhaps Proggy Programming Fonts will work. These fonts are similar, very clean.
December 15th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
Mateusz, I’ve installed it again using Font Book, starting from the preview, and today (!?!?) it works…
don’t ask me why
May 25th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
I installed on Leopard, now Terminal hangs with terminus set in prefs!
May 26th, 2008 at 9:38 am
Pietro,
Strange, I’ve not experienced anything like that. Which version have you installed, eric-cheng or simon-corecode-schubert ?
I have installed the eric-cheng from the package I prepared - terminus-font.tar.gz.
June 18th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Works for me, thanks Mateusz!
July 29th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
I found Eric version better suited for my tiny screen (just turn off antialiasing and everythong will look perfectly).
September 21st, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Thanks a lot!!! I’m used to the terminus font on my Linux box, and was really unhappy with Apple’s font. Now I can finally use Mac OS X terminal without a headache! (Note: don’t forget to turn anti-aliasing off, since this is a bitmap font.)
September 21st, 2008 at 5:54 pm
I’m glad my post was helpful. Thanks for the note on anti-aliasing.