Mateusz Loskot

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.

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 :-)

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 9:39 am and is filed under programming, tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.