Hi Everyone,
If the DevTerm is double VGA resolution, does that mean the max terminal resolution one could expect is something like 160x25 (which is double your typical 80x25 column screen)?
It depends on the font size and window borders you have. But yes, if you use a 8x16 VGA font on a 1280x480 display you will get 160x30 text. And 160x60 if you use 8x8. But remember there are lots of bitmap and TrueType fonts on Linux.
Remember that VGA ran at 640x400 for text mode for compatibility with CGA’s 640x200-based text mode. For graphics VGA was natively 640x480, and was also popular for an extended text mode as 80x30 or 80x60. And the display industry since then has liked to talk about things in terms of that 640x480 size. Example: QVGA (quarter VGA) is 320x240 (not 320x200 like 256-color VGA/MCGA mode). HVGA (half VGA) is 480x320 (generally portrait LCDs in mobile devices). See Graphics display resolution - Wikipedia for some of the industry names.
You could get a 213x36 terminal using X11’s 6x13 bitmap font with xterm and a 0 border with (-b 0). xterm -fn 6x13 -fa "" -b 0 -geometry 213x36 made a window 1278x468. could probably bump it up to -b 1 and still fit.
There are much smaller fonts than this, but they start to become less readable. Even the 6x13 example I gave is kind of limited because it is lacking unicode and emoji. I use the “3270Medium NF” TTF font from Nerd Fonts on my DevTerm, it’s readable at several small sizes and has a good retro look to it and it is compatible with PowerLine and PureLine and VIM-airline
Thanks! You know way more about terminal resolutions than I do. (^_^);
When I look at the version of Terminator I am running, it says it’s using “Ubuntu Mono Regular 13”. I assume this is some standard 9x14 font (At least it looks like a regular font to me)? I assume square fonts are less common than the more traditional rectangle fonts?
I guess what I’m ultimately trying to decide is, if I design a full screen terminal-based application, what resolution would be appropriate for the dev-term, in terms of number of columns vs rows?
It’s entirely personal preference. I use a font - Tamzen - which is readable down to a very small size, so I can cram a lot of characters into dual-VGA.
Best thing is to experiment. Open Terminator, go full-screen with F11, and press Ctrl and - to zoom out. Keep zooming out until you can’t comfortably read it, then Ctrl and + to zoom in. Whatever size that is, there’s you’re answer.