OS X or X11 terminal emulator supporting proportional fonts

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1

Does anybody know of a terminal emulator for Mac OS X supporting proportional fonts?

Preferably a native app, otherwise for X11. Preferably with correct line-wrapping at the window edge, not at a certain number of characters.

I've gotten used to programming in a proportional font (Verdana 13pt) and I'd like to get the same look in my terminal windows.

I'm well aware that full-screen (curses) programs would not render correctly on a proportional font, but I seldom use any. Most of my terminal work involves Bash, compilers, and other line-oriented tools, which should work perfectly well with a proportional font.

For the sake of argument here is some code in my current editor configuration, which I find very readable:

enter image description here

I assume such a terminal emulator should advertise having very long lines, in order to do all the line-wrapping at the display level, instead of making Readline and other "smart" interactive CLI do it themselves. Other than that, I do not see why it should not be possible.

In fact, I might as well go ahead and do it myself, if I cannot find any.

Again, I'm aware Curses and other character-counting applications (such as the output of ls -l) would display incorrectly. Dealing correctly with those, with some form of heuristic or "elastic tabstops" would be a plus, but not a strict requirement.

Tobia

Posted 2013-03-10T00:59:10.710

Reputation: 330

Answers

3

Emacs is available for Mac OS X, supports proportional fonts, and has a terminal emulator. There are a number of Emacs versions available for OS X, so hopefully you can find one you like that has both the fonts and terminal emulator. A possible candidate is Aquamacs, http://aquamacs.org/features.shtml.

stevek_mcc

Posted 2013-03-10T00:59:10.710

Reputation: 640

Thanks, I had not thought of that. I'll wait to see if there is any other option a bit more user friendly (without the M-x C-r M-a M-x nonsense) otherwise I'll accept yours. – Tobia – 2013-07-08T11:51:07.977

You could put the startup commands in your ~/.emacs init file, or if you want to use Emacs as an editor as well, in a separate init file that you load only when starting Emacs as a terminal (-l ~/terminal-init.el).

– stevek_mcc – 2013-07-08T20:52:42.953

@Tobia Did you mean to accept this answer but not award the bounty for it? If not (since it seems like stevek_mcc's answer helped you), you only have a few hours left to award it! – A.M. – 2013-07-10T21:09:21.200

@stevek_mcc I'm upvoting your answer (from 1 to 2) so that you still get some bounty even if Tobia does not assign it to you. (You'll at least get half of it for hitting the +2 vote threshold. :) – A.M. – 2013-07-10T21:10:45.610

What are you talking about? An accepted answer gets the bounty automatically at the end of the period, unless a better answer comes along first. – Tobia – 2013-07-11T08:12:12.950

Asked: 2013-03-10T00:59:10.710

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Active: 2013-07-06T23:59:05.573