# Font Size in terminal shell



## Buggzy... (Feb 10, 2018)

Can I set a 'font size' that tcsh will use on the terminal somewhere ..

tcshrc  or an ENVIROMENT Variable somewhere ...?

Font is quit large so ls -sal tends to wrap and scroll off the page a lot.

Thanks


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## Minbari (Feb 10, 2018)

Are you talking about a terminal emulator (eg. xterm, urxvt,etc.) or FreeBSD console?


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## rigoletto@ (Feb 10, 2018)

For terminals like x11/rxvt-unicode you do that in ~/.Xresources. You should look for the particularities of the terminal you use.


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## Buggzy... (Feb 10, 2018)

Minbari said:


> Are you talking about a terminal emulator (eg. xterm, urxvt,etc.) or FreeBSD console?



That would be a FreeBSD console...


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## Buggzy... (Feb 10, 2018)

lebarondemerde said:


> For terminals like x11/rxvt-unicode you do that in ~/.Xresources. You should look for the particularities of the terminal you use.



Ok I appreciate that advicd as I'll need that soon ...  but right now haven't installed X.
And even later their may be times when I work just from the command line on the console
rather than starting X....
I've looked at env and doesn't seem to be an ENVIRONMENT Variable that does this.


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## Buggzy... (Feb 10, 2018)

Minbari said:


> Are you talking about a terminal emulator (eg. xterm, urxvt,etc.) or FreeBSD console?



I think I found the anser .. https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/vconsole.conf.html


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## Minbari (Feb 10, 2018)

I don't know what video card you have so I'm gonna give you indications for VESA.


```
kldload vesa
```

Next, you need to query the console to find out what modes are available, to do this type (as root):

```
vidcontrol -i mode < /dev/console
```

This will output all the available modes for your card+monitor. (e.g. 280 (0x118) 0x0000001f G 1024x768x32 D   8×16  0xa0000 64k 64k 0xf3000000 3072k). Mode 280 is 1024 x 768 in 32-bit colour and uses a 8×16 font.
Let's just say that you want to use that mode (280) with an increased geometry from 80×25 to 132×60,

```
vidcontrol -g 132×60 MODE_280 < /dev/console
```

If you want to use this as the default every boot, add the following line to your */etc/rc.conf* file:

```
allscreens_flags=”-g 132×60 MODE_280″
```
And also load the VESA driver on boot, by adding the following line to your */boot/loader.conf* file:

```
vesa_load=”YES”
```

If the graphic card is from Intel (IvyBridge->newer) all you need to do is to add to /boot/loader.conf:

```
kern.vty=vt
i915kms_load="YES"
```


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## Buggzy... (Feb 10, 2018)

Buggzy... said:


> Ok I appreciate that advicd as I'll need that soon ...  but right now haven't installed X.
> And even later their may be times when I work just from the command line on the console
> rather than starting X....
> I've looked at env and doesn't seem to be an ENVIRONMENT Variable that does this.



I think I found the answer


Minbari said:


> I don't know what video card you have so I'm gonna give you indications for VESA.
> 
> 
> ```
> ...




Wow Thanks, that's really awesome I'll try that when I get home.
Thanks


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## Snurg (Feb 11, 2018)

VESA is part of GENERIC kernel.

Bad thing is that it does not get the native monitor resolution via EDID, so you'll end up in some low res VESA mode, which probably gets interpolated by monitor, resulting in unsharp display.
For example it would be very nice if it would be able to use FHD, so one could use very nice crystal-sharp and beautiful fonts.

The only way to make vt use the native res of the monitor I know of for now is to switch to console from X.
Maybe somebody knows of a way to do this without X help?


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## CraigHB (Feb 11, 2018)

One note on using `vidcontrol` to set console resolution is it only works with the old sc console driver.  By default FreeBSD uses the newer vt console driver.  You can change the driver by adding kernel.vty=sc in in the loader.conf file.  Though doing that can give you problems with the video driver used in X, depends on the driver.  In my case I use the nVidia blob which works fine with either console driver.


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