Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 5.5
c0e7c17252
The four user guides and the manuals for the PicoCalc, the uConsole, and the Cardputer Zero. Procedures are numbered steps, with a WARNING or a CAUTION before each step that has a risk. The step headings use a colon, and each link to them changed with them. Quoted error messages are in quotation marks, and the menu question is quoted as the app shows it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
43 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
43 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
# Terminals, icons, and the Windows console
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This page explains why MeshTerm looks correct in some terminals and draws empty boxes in
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others. It also tells what MeshTerm does about this on Windows, and how to turn that off.
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MeshTerm draws emoji icons, braille charts, and powerline path chips. Your terminal decides
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if you see them. The font is less important. When a modern terminal must draw a character
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that its font does not have, it takes the character from another font on the machine. Thus
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the app looks correct in Windows Terminal, in the terminal of VS Code, and on macOS and
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Linux. This is usually true also when the font has almost none of these characters.
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The Terminal app of macOS is the exception. The charts can be misaligned there. No Mac
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monospace font has braille, so the terminal takes it from a proportional font, at the wrong
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width.
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The classic Windows console does not take characters from other fonts. This is the black
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`cmd.exe` window that a double-click opens on Windows 10. (Windows 11, version 22H2 and
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later, opens Windows Terminal by default.) The console draws what its one font has, and
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empty boxes for all other characters. No font can correct the icons there. Only two fonts
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on a Windows machine have emoji, and both are proportional. A console does not accept a
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proportional font.
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When MeshTerm starts in this console, it **moves to Windows Terminal**. It tells you, and
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it opens the app there. MeshTerm does not install or change anything. You get one window
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instead of another, and the whole app looks exactly as the screenshots show. Windows
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Terminal is already on each Windows 11 machine. On Windows 10 it is a free install.
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Sometimes there is no Windows Terminal to move to, and the font of the console cannot
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draw the charts. Then MeshTerm offers the next best choice: the charts and marks, without
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the icons. MeshTerm includes
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[Cascadia Mono PL](https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code), the console font of
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Microsoft. It is one of the very few monospace fonts that have braille. MeshTerm can
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install it for your user account only. This needs no administrator rights and no download. If you
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already have a font that can draw the charts (Cascadia, or another such as Iosevka),
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MeshTerm offers to switch to that font instead. In each case, MeshTerm asks first
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(`[y/N]`), and the default answer is no.
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To keep the console that you have, turn all of this off. Go to Preferences → Display →
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Console setup.
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[Configuring MeshTerm](configuration.md) tells where MeshTerm keeps its state, and how to
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point a trial run to another place.
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