batguebi01: Use any font in Terminal

Friday, 2 September 2011

Use any font in Terminal

Many people don't realize it, but there is no need to use a monospaced font in Terminal.app. The reason is that, unlike most other programs that render monospaced text (including all GUI text editors and web browsers I've tried) it enforces a monospaced character width. Therefore, if you type 12345678 in one line and abcdefgh in the next line right below it, then h will align with 8 regardless of whether the font you choose is monospaced or not.

With that being said, I still actually recommend that you do use a monospaced font, like Menlo or DejaVu Sans Mono (the latter is not included with Mac OS X, but is a font very similar to Menlo but slightly better in my opinion). The reason is that these fonts are designed to be readable despite the fact that shorter characters like i and l are just as long as longer characters like w.

If you do decide to try a non-monospaced font in Terminal.app for whatever reason, I suggest you play ...