For years I’ve spent the better part of my day staring at terminals for my day to day work. I’ve used GNOME Terminal with Terminus font for years

My Favorite Linux Terminal Font: Google Noto Mono

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2024-10-14 03:30:05

For years I’ve spent the better part of my day staring at terminals for my day to day work. I’ve used GNOME Terminal with Terminus font for years without issue on 1600x1200 and 1080p displays.

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.

Immediately the ability to scale the UI in GNOME became important and the Terminus font quickly looked odd and felt uncomfortable. I could never find a font size that felt natural like Terminus did for years before UHD.

I dug around the web reading various blog posts about monospace fonts, but none of the popular fonts quite felt right. 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.

One day while wrestling with the awkward font sizes in GNOME terminal I stumbled on Noto Mono and instantly fell in love. 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. The font looked amazing on both machines at size 11. Not too tall, not too wide and nothing weird.