Every timeline in MeshTerm is made of braille characters, and almost no
monospace font has them. Reading the cmap of every font on this machine:
Consolas, Lucida Console, Hack Nerd Font, JetBrains Mono, Fira Code and
Source Code Pro all carry zero of the 256 -- and so does DejaVu Sans *Mono*,
which is where the widespread "install DejaVu for braille" advice falls down.
DejaVu *Sans*, proportional, has all 256. That is the whole trick: terminals
fall back to a proportional face for the block, and the charts have always
been drawn by a font nobody chose.
Which is fine everywhere except the one host that does no fallback. In the
classic Windows console -- what a double-clicked build gets -- Consolas draws
57 of the 122 characters we use and none of the charts.
So MeshTerm now bundles Cascadia Mono PL (SIL OFL, licence beside it) and
offers it there. Cascadia is one of two mainstream coder fonts with the block;
the PL build adds the powerline separators the path lines want, and at 723KB
covers exactly what the 2.4MB Nerd Font build does. A machine that already has
Cascadia -- every Windows 11, anyone with Windows Terminal -- is only offered
the switch.
Both halves are verified on Windows 10 22H2, and neither needs admin: a font
installs for one user under %LOCALAPPDATA% with AddFontResourceW and an HKCU
registration, and SetCurrentConsoleFontEx selects a face the console's own
properties dialog will not even list -- that dialog offers only what is under
the machine-wide Console\TrueTypeFont key, which here is Lucida Console and
Consolas, so without that API the font could be installed and still unpickable.
Declining is answered with what declining looks like -- charts as rows of
boxes -- and asked once more, because a reader who has never seen the app
cannot picture what it costs. A second no is remembered in the console_font
preference and never raised again.
Windows locks a font file once loaded: it cannot be deleted even elevated,
even after restarting the font cache, until the next logon. So nothing here
offers to uninstall one, and the install is written to be repeatable instead
of reversible.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 5
f06b593a0f