Font for mac osx that is as readable and compact as the default xterm (X11) font.

Question

The font used in xterms is extremely compact yet readable. What font is that? The closest I've found that I can use in other other applications is DejaVu Sans Mono or Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Those are as compact as xterms vertically but take up more space horizontally.

I'd really like to switch from xterms to Terminal.app and this is the one thing holding me back.

(I also think that font would be much better for emacs, xcode, or whatever editor.)

ADDED: In Terminal.app you can adjust the character and line spacing for any font. Is this possible in other applications?

I'm open to any other font that is as compact and readable as the xterm font. Dina looks really nice but it doesn't seem to work for Mac.

Answer 1

Character- and line-spacing are customizable at the bottom of the Fonts panel.

Answer 2

X11 default fonts are usually bitmap fonts, which aren't of any use to non-X applications ... on my Mac box, the default font for X11 apps seems to be -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--14-130-75-75-c-70-iso8859-1, corresponding to the file /usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/misc/7x14-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz

You can display the character table with the command /usr/X11R6/bin/xfd -fn -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--14-130-75-75-c-70-iso8859-1 and check if it's the one you see in your xterms. If so, I'm afraid there's nothing to do: PCF fonts are (very) low resolution bitmap fonts, and that's why they look so good on screen, by the way (they just fit with your particular screen resolution); but they're no way other Mac OS X applications are going to use them.

Answer 3

My favorite pixel font is 'Dina ttf 10px' at 16pt on a dark background. It makes a great font for coding, since it has slashed zeros, and distinct characters.

You can find the Mac TrueType version at http://www.geenat.com/?p=66 and the original bitmap version at http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Jibz/Dina/index.html

The Proggy font that Dina is based on is also really sharp at a small text size. Unfortunately, it is a little too small for me.

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Additionally, you can use SIMBL plugins to tweak Terminal.app to better suit you. In addition to the color preferences, I find all the plugins below really helpful when using Terminal.

For a start the default colours in Terminal.app are difficult to see. To fix this, you can install Ciaran Walsh's custom color plugin.

• SIMBL - http://www.culater.net/software/SIMBL/SIMBL.php
• Custom colors - http://ciaranwal.sh/2007/11/01/customising-colours-in-leopard-terminal
• Tab Switching (if you prefer CMD-1 instead of CMD-SHIFT-{}/arrow keys) - http://ciaranwal.sh/2007/12/10/tab-switching-in-terminal
• Visor - http://visor.binaryage.com/
• MegaZoomer for Fullscreen - http://ianhenderson.org/megazoomer.html
• The IR_Black color scheme - http://blog.infinitered.com/entries/show/6

Answer 4

It's not exactly the same, but 10 point Monaco (with anti-aliasing turned off) is pretty darn close. I'd say it's actually a little better, because Monaco's 1/l and O/0 glyphs are more distinct than the X font's.

Answer 5

Here are alternatives I've tried. (Thanks to Will and others.)

1. Monaco 10pt with .9 line spacing (I don't know how to squish line or character spacing in anything other than Terminal.app) takes up exactly as much vertical and horizontal space as the xterm font. Without the line space squishing it takes up more vertical space. I don't think the squishing harms readability. Monaco has the advantage of slashed zeros but has worse angle brackets (they bump into adjacent characters awkardly, eg, "~>"). Upper case characters ("A" in particular) also don't look as good in Monaco. Mostly though, they are about the same.

2. Monaco 9pt fixes the angle brackets and is more vertically compact than the xterm font (same horizontally). Capital I is pretty sucky (hard to distinguish from l and i and |).

3. ProggyTiny from Proggy Fonts at 11pt. Setting the line spacing to .9 makes it vertically slightly more compact than X11's xterm font. Either way, it takes up exactly as much space horizontally. With or without line space squishing though, I find this option definitively worse than Monaco. The other Proggy varieties seem to not be as compact as the xterm font.

4. Anonymous at 10pt with .95 character spacing (I still don't know how to squish character or line spacing in anything but Terminal.app) and normal line spacing is exactly the same size as the X11 font. Squishing the character spacing causes upper case characters to touch each other very slightly and numbers are rather ugly that way. With vertical (line) space squishing it can be made more vertically compact than the xterm font without harming readability. (Anonymous at 9pt is very very compact and still quite readable.) I really don't like the caret ("^") in this font, with or without squishing.

5. FixedMedium6x13 set to size 13 and line spacing 0.80 yields the xterm font exactly. My friend David Yang reports that this works flawlessly for him on Snow Leopard. I'm on Leopard and it's unusable for me (with squished line spacing that makes it as compact as X11) because there's some kind of refresh problem -- it cuts off the tops of the letters until the terminal window re-renders, like when you alt-tab away from it.

Others I intend to try:

• Envy Code R: http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-coding-font-released
• Inconsolata: http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
• Droid Sans Mono: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droid_(font)

Answer 6

I've been using Bitstream Vera Mono later DeJaVu Sans Mono (for more unicode characters) for quite a long time but I've switched a few months ago to the font used by Android, Google's OS for mobile phones, called Droid Sans Mono. It is really more readable for me. For Terminal.app, I do shrink it a bit horizontally though.

Answer 7

The font used in xterms is extremely compact yet readable. What font is that?

The font you are referring to is known as "fixed" or "6x13".

I started (but gave up) a "6x13 redux" which was meant to be one of those TrueType fonts that only looks good at one size but was usable in Terminal.app. I gave up because creating a font with UNICODE glyphs is a HUGE undertaking. Just look at this glyph table for 6x13. BTW, that "6x13 Redux" font I created only seems to work in Terminal.app on Tiger, not on Leopard.

The closest I've come to 6x13 is ProggySquare at 11pt.

Answer 8

I have successfully gotten Emacs.App to use the beloved misc-fixed 7x14 font. And it looks GOOD.

1) download ucs-fonts.tar.gz from http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html

2) extract the file 7x14.bdf

3) install FontForge (fontforge.sourceforge.net)

4) open 7x14.bdf in fontforge

5) in fontforge do File->Generate Fonts with "No Outline Font" and "Apple bitmap only sfont (dfont)"

6) save as /Library/Fonts/FixedMedium7x14.dfont

7) in your .emacs (setq default-font "-apple-Fixed-medium-normal-normal--14--*-*-m-0-iso10646-1")

8) WIN

Answer 9

Just use one of these:

• http://henrik.synth.no/fonts/6x12.dfont
• http://henrik.synth.no/fonts/6x13.dfont
• http://henrik.synth.no/fonts/7x13.dfont
• http://henrik.synth.no/fonts/7x14.dfont

You might want to adjust the line height to 0.85 when you select the font.

(Thanks to Marty Vona for the guide)

Answer 10

Try andale mono without anti-aliasing... it looks good on my mac pro 15in