> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > From: <jo...@armadilloaerospace.com> > Date: Wed, 13 May 2020 23:36:57 -0700
Hi John, > The process of using 40/50 row vga text modes is pretty cumbersome now: > > wsfontload -h 8 -e ibm /usr/share/misc/pcvtfonts/vt220l.808 > wsconscfg -dF 1 > wsconscfg -t 80x50 1 > > I just reported a bug and a fix with font corruption, but I want to > propose a > few usability improvements that I am interested in hacking on. > > Not caring about extended VGA text modes is a perfectly reasonable > position today, so wave me off if this wouldn't be desirable. Must admit that I consider the VGA text console a thing of the past, but fixes and (small) imrpovements are always welcome. I think the example you give above illustrates that this functionality isn't used much by the people who work on the code... > Including a default 8x8 and 8x10 font in the kernel to avoid the > need to wsfontload would be nice, and allow it to be used for early > boot. Is 4.5k too much for a fringe feature? 2k for just the 8x8? Given that we embed four differen sizes of the framebuffer console font, you may have a point. Not going to happen on the installer ramdisk kernels though. > Wsconscfg could allow the -dF options at the same time as the type > and emul options, allowing an existing screen to be deleted and > reconfigured in a single step. Sounds like the sort of usability improvement that would be welcome. > Better yet would be to allow the screen type to be reconfigured on > the fly without deleting it at all. If you're just changing the number of rows and can preserve the content, that would indeed be better. > If that is done, then wscons could support ctrl-alt-+/- to > dynamically change text modes. Have to be careful there that we don't take those key combos away from programs though. > In the modern world, it would be really nice to have similar ability > to change the fonts used by the framebuffer based consoles to get > denser text modes. Wsconsctl can report the > display.fontwidth/height, but can't change it. Use of different > spleen fonts could be defined as a "type" like the VGA modes and > take advantage of the other changes. In principle this is possible already, but there are some rough edges. But since wscons doesn't really have a concept of having identical fonts in different sizes, I think you need to include the size when you specify the font. Something like: wsconsctl display.font="Spleen 8x16" works I believe, with the caveat that drivers like inteldrm(4) limit the number of rows and columns to 160 x 160. At least robert@ had some success with this. He might be able to provide more details.
