Changed my #OpenBSD writing-dedicated box from running #cwm to #i3wm -- I like cwm, but it's still a bit too mousey for my taste.
I also changed all of my fonts (both xterm and i3/i3status) to be bitmapped (the "fixed" font), so everything is looking REALLY crisp.
Maybe I'm getting quite crochety, but at this point, I think I'd much rather have a lower res screen with crisp bitmapped fonts than a crazy high-res screen and vector fonts.
The only thing I'm missing is #emoji. My i3status looks like
cpu 31% | load 0.80 | mem 9% | dsk 13.4% | net Gallifrey 82% | chrg 89% 0.00W | Sun 2024.05.26 06:42 AM
instead of
cpu 05% | 📈 load 0.29 | 28.5% | disk 59.7% | Gallifrey 67% | Sun 2024.05.26 06:42 AM
@rl_dane
Emojis are indispensable to me, I rely on them heavily in TUI stuff — they make it possible to add visual anchors without relying on different fonts and colour.
I don't think I'm going back to bit mapped fonts though — my only reason for using them was — they looked good enough to be user in terminal and that made terminal emulators blazing fast, with the progress that was made the computing power got excessive IMO, so performance isn't an issue.
I'm a big fan of JetBrains Mono, and it looks fairly good at nearly high and low resolutions, but I think antialiasing looks gross on low res displays (makes my eyes feel blurrier than they really are), and without AA, no vector font looks particularly good at low point sizes.
Maybe there's a new algorithm for that these days, but historically, vector fonts at low point sizes always needed to have hand-tweaked bitmaps.
The bitmapped fonts I'm using actually have a decent bit of Unicode symbols and even some emoji, but they don't show up in #i3wm's i3bar for some reason.
If I ever get the skills/gumption to write my own OS (seems to be the new fad among alpha geeks, lol), I'd love to have an OS with a fixed 1024x768 monochrome display. (Or maybe optionally 1182x665 for 16:9 with nearly the same number of pixels (402 less))
@rl_dane
And when it comes to visual angle, good commercial font, like Cascadia Code, can look really nice, in both low and high resolution. Free ones are mixed bad though, I like Fira Code in high resolutions, but on my old ThinkPad T43 it looks disgusting.