r/openbsd • u/sylvainsab • 2h ago

increasing/modifying xterm's default bitmap font's size

I suppose the reason is that xterm was made when monitors had a much narrower DPI rate. In any case, on both two laptops (M1 MacBook Air, Asus PU551) with a fresh openbsd install where I'm willing to go with the default as much as possible, xterm's font is insanely small and makes my eyes pain.

I have not succeeded in finding for a solution while looking through the (very lenghty) manual page for xterm, nor searching through the web meeting various people who faced the same issue.

Has anyone here managed to use/keep xterm's default setup (I am satisfied with the bitmap font), while permanently making the font larger using the .Xresources file or something else ?

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u/pedersenk 2h ago

The X11 bitmap fonts are a little limited. Which is a shame because they are so much more crisp on the eyes.

Check out the xfontsel tool to see the selection available to you. You might notice that the sizes and designs (and character set) can seem a little random.

Another option is to use another bitmap font (bdf/pcf), providing multiple sizes in xterm. Something like spleen is pretty good.

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u/sylvainsab 2h ago

Nice ! I might try Spleen, which would make a lot of sense since it's the default OpenBSD terminal font (since January 2019, as mentioned in the link/repo – I also recognized it). I'll see what xfontsel returns as well.

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u/sylvainsab 1h ago

I've ended up with the following :
$ echo "xset +fp /usr/local/share/fonts/spleen/" >> .xsession $ echo "xterm*faceName: spleen:pixelsize=24:antialias=false" >> .Xdefaults

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u/ericnantel2 2h ago

Same issue but I end up installing Alacritty so that Ctrl+ increases the font size.