[PLUG] UTF-8, Virtual Consoles, and Alpine

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Tue Jul 26 18:44:41 UTC 2016


On Tue, 26 Jul 2016, John Jason Jordan wrote:

> Doesn't the terminal use a font for display purposes? It's probably a
> monospaced font but, I thought everything ultimately used some font or
> another.

John,

   Yes it's using the 10x20 monospaced, san-serif font.

> Or do you mean that X isn't even running, e.g., you boot to the command
> line? In my case I used Gnome terminal and in its preferences I see that
> it is using 'System Fixed Width Font.' Just for kicks I grabbed some
> Hebrew text from a web page and pasted into Gnome terminal. It looked
> perfect. But Gnome terminal is a GUI. I never boot without X, so I don't
> know what might happen.

   I always boot into runlevel 3, multiuser console mode, and run starx to
load the X Window System. Sometimes I work in one or more consoles.

   I'm a command line user as much as possible: alpine, emacs, R, etc. As a
touch-typist (thanks to the Army insisting I type at least 55 wpm to get out
of counter-intelligence school), I much prefer to work from the keyboard
rather than rolling the trackball around. As many GUI applications that I
use that can be configured to work from the keyboard and ignore the
pointy-thing are set up that way.

Thanks,

Rich



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