Monaco font in a better terminal

Posted by unbrand on 20 December 2005 | 2 Comments

Tags: toys, learning

Here’s a quick tip on how to get any Mac font into GLTerm. GLTerm is a lightning-fast terminal for the Mac that is heaps better than Apple’s Terminal program. Why is it better? It used 3D acceleration to render the fonts. To render the fonts, they must be in .bdf format.

GLTerm comes with a few fonts, but I’m partial to Monaco which is the default in Apple’s Terminal. So, to get Monaco in GLTerm we first need to convert it to .bdf format:

  • open font book, highlight the Monaco font, then choose File/Export Fonts…
  • download & install the Mac package Fondu
  • run “fondu Monaco.dfont” from the dir where you exported Monaco in the first step
  • copy the resulting .bdf’s to /Applications/GLTerm.app/Contents/fonts
  • Monaco should now be available in GLTerm’s preferences

Life’s too short for a slow Terminal application.

UPDATE: If you display a text file through cat, less, emacs, etc., any hyperlinks will be underlined, colored differently, and clickable. If you click on the link (mouse cursor will not change, though) your system-default browser will display the page. Very nice! And I don’t know of a way to do this in Apple’s Terminal so there’s another reason to bail on Terminal.

Post your comment

Comments

  • <p>No, GLTerm does not have tabs unfortunately. I&rsquo;ve tried iTerm, but found it to be dog slow. It&rsquo;s easy to set up command-line aliases for shelling into various servers, though. Not as good as tabs but not bad, for my needs. Overall, the speed of GLTerm wins out for me, especially when looking at big log files.</p>

    Posted by unbrand, 01/07/2007 11:39am (1 year ago)

  • <p>Hmm GLTerm sounds good, does it have tabs? The one I use ( <a href='http://iterm.sourceforge.net/' rel="nofollow">i
    Term</a>)does good tabs but still doesnt compare that well to the gnome and kde ones, I had to do a large amount of messing round with profiles to get the yellow in vim syntax highlighting looking decent.</p>

    Posted by Don, 01/07/2007 11:39am (1 year ago)

RSS feed for comments on this page