Re: [Bug-apl] Linux console APL

[Blake McBride]

I am not sure I understand what you are talking about with respect to "start_unicode".  I literally do nothing except run GNU APL with atk.  That's all I ever need.  It does everything.  The console/terminal program that comes with LinuxMint works fine.  All of the APL characters appear as expected.

Blake

On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 12:12 AM, David B. Lamkins <address@hidden> wrote:

I thought I'd share this (new to me) discovery...

I've experimented with running APL in the Linux console. In the past I've followed the advice to download the APL console font and use the start_unicode command. That works fine, of course. The only inconvenience is having to run start_unicode again to restore the normal console font.

But fbterm offers an alternative. This is a terminal emulator that runs in the console's frame buffer. It's fully aware of modern Linux fonts, which means that I can use GNU FreeMono to get the APL glyphs. What's really interesting, I think, is that fbterm searches all of your installed fonts looking for a font to present each character. I'm not clear on the details, but it ends up choosing (at least on my system) some very nice glyphs for both APL and non-APL characters without needing to fiddle with FreeType rendering options.

On top of that, fbterm supports up to ten windows. That means I don't have to remember to run a multiplexer (screen, dvtm, tmux).

In Fedora 24, I installed fbterm and fbterm-udevrules. The latter ensures that fbterm has access the framebuffer when you run it as a non-root user.

In case you're asking "why bother?": I'm trying to move away from GUIs for most of my work. I run X now primarily to interact with "rich" web content (primarily Facebook and Youtube). I find that not having a full-featured web browser a keystroke away helps me to concentrate on my work. That, and the console just "feels faster" than even a tiling window manager.