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 :-)
Great Tip, Mateusz, thanks
it works even for the eyes of a little green man
I’m glad you’ve found it helpful.
:-(
not working with my Leopard install
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.
Mateusz, I’ve installed it again using Font Book, starting from the preview, and today (!?!?) it works…
don’t ask me why
I installed on Leopard, now Terminal hangs with terminus set in prefs!
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.
Works for me, thanks Mateusz!
I found Eric version better suited for my tiny screen (just turn off antialiasing and everythong will look perfectly).
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.)
I’m glad my post was helpful. Thanks for the note on anti-aliasing.
Thanks for keeping these up!
@Nicholas You’re welcome!
Has anyone tried this on a recent “snow leopard”? I get blank terminal windows 1 character wide (and not horizontally resizable) when I tell it to use Terminus (both in iterm2 and in terminal.app). Antialiasing is off.
Help help! :)
@Philip Paeps: I had this problem on my MBA as well and I recall I just removed antialias text but it didn’t work after fiddling some back and forth the font started working.
Now tho, I am on my new work MBP and it just refuses to work >_> Still trying to remember what the I did on the MBA to make it work…
Oh well, it works and I don’t know why (gotta love when that happens…).
One second the fonts was just blank space, then *bam* Font Book crashes, I restart it and the fonts are there and working! I mainly use it in the terminal and my changed settings are:
Size 14pt.
Character spacing 1.05
Antialias text off
Oh, I copied the fonts stright into ~/Library/Fonts dunno if that makes any difference.