Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 5.5
b7a1ad47c2
Every list of three or more takes the serial comma: the one-liner in
pyproject.toml, meshterm/__init__.py, and --help ("USB, Bluetooth, or TCP",
"Windows, macOS, and Linux"), the README, the changelog, the manuals, the
issue and PR templates, and six strings the app shows (the region-name
rule, a repeater setting's help, the diagnostics tool's description, and
the archive confirms). The Windows-console notice is rewrapped so its
comma keeps it inside 72 columns.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
38 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
38 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
# Terminals, icons, and the Windows console
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Why MeshTerm looks right in some terminals and draws empty boxes in others, what it does
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about it on Windows, and how to turn all of that off.
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MeshTerm is drawn with emoji icons, braille charts, and powerline path chips. Whether you
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see them is up to your *terminal*, not really your font: a modern terminal, asked for a
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character its font doesn't have, quietly borrows it from another font on the machine.
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That's why the app looks right in Windows Terminal, in VS Code's terminal, and on macOS
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and Linux — usually with a font that contains almost none of it. The exception is macOS's
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Terminal app, where the charts may draw misaligned: no Mac monospace font has braille, so
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it is borrowed from a proportional one at the wrong width.
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The classic Windows console — the black `cmd.exe` window a double-click opens on
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Windows 10 — doesn't borrow. (Windows 11, 22H2 and later, opens Windows Terminal by
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default instead.) It draws what its one font holds and empty boxes for everything else, and
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no font fixes the icons there: the only two fonts on a Windows machine with emoji in them
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are proportional, and a console won't take a proportional font.
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So when MeshTerm lands in that console it just **moves to Windows Terminal** — it says
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so, and opens there. Nothing is installed and nothing is changed; it's one window instead
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of another, and it's the whole app exactly as the screenshots show it. Windows Terminal is
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already on every Windows 11 machine and is a free install on Windows 10.
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Where there's no Windows Terminal to move to, and the console's font can't already draw
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the charts, MeshTerm offers the next best thing instead — the charts and marks, without
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the icons. It ships
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[Cascadia Mono PL](https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code), Microsoft's own console
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font and one of the very few monospace faces that carries braille at all, and will install
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it just for you: no administrator rights, nothing downloaded. If you already have a font
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that can draw the charts (Cascadia, or another such as Iosevka), it offers to switch to
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that one instead. Either way it asks first (`[y/N]`), and the answer defaults to no.
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Preferences → Display → Console setup turns all of this off if you'd rather stay put.
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Where MeshTerm keeps its state, and how to point a trial run somewhere else, is in
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[Configuring MeshTerm](configuration.md).
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