Baslinux mailing list

[Day Brown <daybrown AT hypertech.net>]

James Miller wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, James Miller wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, russ loroville wrote:
> >
> > > What is the default font display in the xterminal?
> > >
> > Well, I feel sure enough on this to pipe in: I think it's 80x25.
> >
> Oops.  So much for graceful mistakes.  Make that 7x14.  That's for the
> xterm from the menu which has, I believe, the same settings as the one on
> the toolbar.
It is confusing. 7x14 is also the EGA ROM BIOS font. 14X25=350, the
number of scan lines in EGA. 25X40 made a lotta sense on the first 9"
greenscreens. 25X80 made even more for CGA 12"; and now that the average
is moving to 17" SVGA with 3-4 pixels/millimeter, 50X80, or maybe even
43X132 is just as readable. 

In general, the amount of text you will see on a screen has about the
same maximum 'content' as a 6th grade reader. I guess they know what the
attention span is for most newbies. But there has always been a niche
market for those who enjoy oddities. The Green 'Matrix' screensaver is
all over the place, but only those of us who began with the 9" monitors
understand what that is about.

BL itself is kind of a minimalist statement about the baroque overdone
layering of symbology the GUI distros are producing.

Since the BL user is always root, maybe curses could change the font on
the fly, between screens, without requiring the user to return to the
CLI?