4 ms·

Whenever I see a new interesting terminal emulator my main prerequisite to see if it's worth playing with is if it supports bitmap fonts, and unfortunately this

Whenever I see a new interesting terminal emulator my main prerequisite to see if it's worth playing with is if it supports bitmap fonts, and unfortunately this one fails the test. I can't live without bitmap monospace fonts. I don't have a fancy 4k monitor so TTF fonts are blurry in comparison to a crisp bitmap font.

crabboi 1y ago
oof good ppoint, would be good open an issue about it. I use the term and the maintainer is fairly active in responses
JdeBP 1y ago
Your thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45354014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45354014 can probably be extended from that particular one to all terminal emulators that have "We use the GPU!" on the marketing features list, because they are all influenced by alacritty and Goyal's Kitty.
- fishgoesblub 1y ago
  My main and side terminal (Alacritty, and Wezterm) are both GPU accelerated and support Bitmap fonts.
  - JdeBP 1y ago
    Those two are already balanced by Zutty and Rio. So let's have a look around at some of the emulators that make using the GPU a marketing point. DarkTile (https://github.com/liamg/darktile https://github.com/liamg/darktile) accepts TTF and OTF, so presumably if you can get your bitmap font of choice converted into those formats you are alright. GhosTTY (https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty) gained proper bitmap font support just last month, the issues list says, but is reliant upon what FreeType and CoreText can handle. It has an open issue discussing those vis-a-vis bitmap fonts. Trap2 (https://github.com/tale/trap2 https://github.com/tale/trap2) likewise relies upon FreeType. Contour (https://github.com/contour-terminal/contour https://github.com/contour-terminal/contour) at least appears to have bitmap font support. Alacritty, WezTerm, and Kitty get a lot of mentions in the issues list.

crabboi 1y ago

oof good ppoint, would be good open an issue about it. I use the term and the maintainer is fairly active in responses

JdeBP 1y ago

Your thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45354014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45354014 can probably be extended from that particular one to all terminal emulators that have "We use the GPU!" on the marketing features list, because they are all influenced by alacritty and Goyal's Kitty.

fishgoesblub 1y ago
My main and side terminal (Alacritty, and Wezterm) are both GPU accelerated and support Bitmap fonts.
- JdeBP 1y ago
  Those two are already balanced by Zutty and Rio. So let's have a look around at some of the emulators that make using the GPU a marketing point. DarkTile (https://github.com/liamg/darktile https://github.com/liamg/darktile) accepts TTF and OTF, so presumably if you can get your bitmap font of choice converted into those formats you are alright. GhosTTY (https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty) gained proper bitmap font support just last month, the issues list says, but is reliant upon what FreeType and CoreText can handle. It has an open issue discussing those vis-a-vis bitmap fonts. Trap2 (https://github.com/tale/trap2 https://github.com/tale/trap2) likewise relies upon FreeType. Contour (https://github.com/contour-terminal/contour https://github.com/contour-terminal/contour) at least appears to have bitmap font support. Alacritty, WezTerm, and Kitty get a lot of mentions in the issues list.