For some time, I’ve used Dimitar Zhekov’s clean, fixed-width font Terminus for terminal-heavy situations in both GNU/Linux and Windows. I’m clueless in the area of typography, but Terminus looks oddly appealing when looking at e.g. code (which I don’t write myself), configuration and log files. I keep backup copies of a TTF version of Terminus in my public file archive.

A few days ago, I discovered Consolas, a somewhat recent addition to Microsoft’s free TTF font collection (available for download on microsoft.com, no special MS software like Visual Studio is required), and I’m probably going to use it for some console based tasks, at least on Windows machines. Please note that Consolas is designed to be used with ClearType, a font anti-aliasing technology found in Windows XP and later. Without ClearType, Consolas isn’t worth looking at.

What I’ve found comparing the aforementioned fonts so far, is that while I like looking at Consolas in my IRC client, I still prefer the more blockish Terminus for staring at and scanning through code and logs. Consolas makes text in human languages, including busy IRC debates, readable at smaller sizes, but is in my opinion suboptimal for navigating through and quickly locating parts of structured text blocks.

EDIT: I’ve later found the following comparisons of fixed-width programming fonts: CodeProject, Stack Overflow.

The problem I’ve had with Putty is that the “End” key won’t work, at least not while connected to various Linux based systems where $TERM is set to xterm. In Putty, “Home” will also not work, unless I set the "Terminal - Keyboard - The Home and End Keys" option to rxvt.

I haven’t solved the problem, but some nice person in #windows on FreeNode told me to use the key combination Ctrl+E to produce the behaviour expected from the “End” key and Ctrl+A for the “Home” key. This works for me.

Actual IRC quote (more keywords for the bots, I guess):

“I tend to only use C-a C-e, they work all around (emacs editing mode) in shells.. and I am an emacs user so.. :P. Besides, this laptop has really badly positioned end/home keys”

I’ve lived in Windows XP Home Edition on my home desktop for the last few months. It hasn’t been a very pleasant experience: Windows is feeling increasingly like the microwave meal of desktop operating systems – easy and quick to use, if you don’t give your environment much thought, but unhealthy and unsophisticated in the long run. As usual, it’s the availability of third party (entertainment related) software and stupid hardware compatibility issues that make me play with dark forces.

I also take for granted that WHS has some quirks making it barely usable for Unixy people, and by the way, what kind of an operating system requires a minimum of 512 megabytes of RAM and a Pentium III processor to sit on a network to serve a web interface and files? Again, one of my favorite examples of what real software can do, is this story by a guy whose Celeron 466 MHz box running FreeBSD almost survived the owner’s WordPress blog being featured on Slashdot.

On a sidenote, I’ve used normal pc hardware running Debian’s rolling testing release as a multi purpose home server for some time now. Doing this really simplifies a lot of things, and creates new possibilities: everything from GNU Screen powered IRC, downloading ahem.. Linux install disc ISOs, NFS and Samba sharing. But what amazes me is the new uses for this new kind of, for server use dedicated consumer products (perhaps running a more suitable OS), the very smart people populating the Internet and various Free Software projects most certainly will develop. Especially a few product generations from now, when commodity home server hardware might support hotswappable devices and perhaps even different interfaces for interacting with your physical home, there must be pretty interesting things one could do with a server at home.

Note: I submitted a slightly different version of this text as an article to Slashdot a few minutes ago, but as usual, I doubt that they’ll release it.