To try and demonstrate the differences of the font, I setup a series of GNOME terminals with a simple directory listing of the Linux kernel that I had lying around on both my machines in the default terminal size of 80x24 for comparison. Not too tall, not too wide and nothing weird.Īfter a few months of running this font, I figured it’s now my turn to share with the world so this underrated font gets some more attention. The font looked amazing on both machines at size 11. I can’t remember if I was on my desktop or laptop when I first discovered the font, but I quickly reviewed the font on the other machine and was delighted. One day while wrestling with the awkward font sizes in GNOME terminal I stumbled on Noto Mono and instantly fell in love. I always installed Google’s Noto fonts to handle international characters on Arch Linux but never gave it much more thought for anything beyond web page rendering.

I dug around the web reading various blog posts about monospace fonts, but none of the popular fonts quite felt right. I could never find a font size that felt natural like Terminus did for years before UHD.

Immediately the ability to scale the UI in GNOME became important and the Terminus font quickly looked odd and felt uncomfortable. Recently I bought two LG 27UD58 monitors for my desktop and swapped out my laptop display with the 4K UHD display offered by Dell as UHD slowly stole my heart with its sharpness and increased screen real estate. I’ve used GNOME Terminal with Terminus font for years without issue on 1600x12p displays. For years I’ve spent the better part of my day staring at terminals for my day to day work.

Linux best font for terminal