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High Readability for your Terminal.app (tempe.st)
20 points by intinig on Jan 22, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 25 comments


Not very impressive. I'll take the "Pro" theme with size 13 font any day over this.


I agree. I'll have to try it with Consolas to see the difference, but the default "Homebrew" theme is pretty good for me as well.


Don't care for Consolas but the blue/yellow color scheme is acceptable with Monaco.


Monaco 10 over here. Using 13 makes me feel like grandma.


Pro + Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (10pt) for me.


OSS UI God Raph Levine has an Open Source Consolas called Inconsolata you might want to try on Linux.


I use Mac OS X. Inconsolata is a nice font, but I'm not a fan of using it in the terminal. It's too curvy when compared to Consolas for my liking (which is my font in Xcode). Take a Look at the end of the letters "C", "S", "e", or "y" for example. To put it a different way, Consolas is to Helvetica as Inconsolata is to Arial. Only, Consolas isn't a hideously overused font.

I'm a bit of a font nerd and personally believe that Bitstream Vera font family is the single best UI-related project to come out of Linux.


Just installed it and found it way too harsh on my eyes. I have no eyesight problems so a background with a harsh contrast like that does more bad than good.

I've settled on Novel theme (black on creme background; which is similar to HN background) and I find it the best when my eyes are tired. I also use Panic Sans font. I've tried all kinds of fonts (including Consolas) and Panic Sans is absolutely the best one I've tried. Definitely give Panic Sans a try: http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2007/04/in_love_with_a_fo...

Download: http://rapidshare.com/files/187757062/Panic_Sans.dfont.zip


As I'm not at a Mac at the moment, could someone post a screenshot of this terminal style?


Screenshot, with Consolas replaced by Inconsolata: http://baldessin.fr/2009/giovanistyle-20090122-154740.png


Is there anyway to make HN more readable? I seriously find the contrast between the Headline and points/submitter line to be very difficult, especially once the page has been visited.

Am I the only one who finds the readability to be poor?


I don't know why people are putting this sort of work on GitHub instead of dotfiles. GitHub takes a while to load, and there are two wasted clicks here (the file in question, then "Raw"). At the very least he could have linked directly to the raw file.

I keep my Vim stuff on FreeHg, but that's because we're talking about possibly hundreds of files when you consider the color schemes, doc files, plugins, etc. More importantly, it's awesome to be able to quickly pull in all of my vim stuff onto any machine with Hg and I needed this setup to easily sync between work, the server, and home.


Because the dotfiles homepage says "Latest files uploaded" and lists dates that are three years old. If it's not dead, it's apparently working to give that impression.


You're looking at dotfiles.com, but I was referring to dotfiles.org.


No self-respecting terminal user should suffer with Terminal.app--xterm supports more colors and more features. Even iTerm is a better alternative.


Terminal.app isn't so bad once you install TerminalColours and MouseTerm. xterm can be difficult to configure, it doesn't do tabs, and copying and pasting follow X11 rules in it. I prefer native applications wherever possible.

iTerm on the other hand is slow and bug-ridden. The last thing I want when using a terminal is for it to render choppily and crash on me.


Terminal.app still only supports 8* colors. And GNU screen is a more-than-capable replacement for tabs.

I'll have to try out MouseTerm later.


MouseTerm is great! I've been looking for something like this for a while...

Thank you!


Terminal.app is better than the terminal in 10.4 but it still feels slow. Booting X11.app and using xterm or rxvt is so much faster, in every little command there's a slight wait in Terminal.app, while it's instant in rxvt or mrxvt. Here's my .Xdefaults file for getting good colors in xterm and rxvt

http://pastie.org/368122


I have a strange problem on Leopard that I didn't have on Tiger where I lose all my ctrl+ commands. I can't ctrl+l to clear the screen, I can't ctrl+a to go to the beginning of the line, etc.

I use iTerm normally but have confirmed this problem with Terminal.app also. Has anybody else run into this? Very frustrating.


Mine works just fine. What do you use as your terminal settings? (terminal preferences -> advanced -> declare terminal as)

Mine's set to xterm-color, and all the bindings work just fine.


Terminal.app doesn't behave exactly the same as an xterm, so using "xterm-color" is not ideal. I would suggest "dtterm" or "Apple_Terminal" if it's available.


Mine is xterm-color too. Also, in iTerm the TERM envioronment variable is set to 'linux' and I have this problem with both apps.


I'm using the IR_Black style which can be found here: http://blog.infinitered.com/entries/show/6


will this work in OSX 10.4?




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