A Font of Text Configurations

Holo Shed OS for the Win4 is going remarkably well. Having a physical keyboard and a "native" landscape display has made the work of developing a bespoke Linux distro way easier than it would have been on the Steam Deck.

Old Man Eyes

Of course, Linuxing on the Win4 does have its downsides in the form of a 6" FHD display that makes the text show up way too small out of the box, at least for my aging eyeballs. X11, GTK/GNOME and Pantheon do all theoretically support "HiDPI" modes and scaling, but those Three Stooges get in each other's way more often than not. Instead, the most reliable solution I've found is grabbing Dconf Editor and just searching for any setting for "font" or "size." Having an interactive tool for this has been ace, by the way, since you can preview (and revert) settings extremwely quickly.

Here's a list of everything I changed (conveniently grabbed from the CLI by running dconf dump /:

[ca/desrt/dconf-editor]
saved-pathbar-path='/org/gnome/gedit/plugins/externaltools/font'
window-height=443
window-width=894

[desktop/ibus/panel]
custom-font='Sans 14' ; will probably bump this higher


[io/elementary/files/file-chooser]
window-size=(892, 450)

[io/elementary/files/preferences]
sidebar-width=191
window-size=(1000, 680)

[io/elementary/terminal/settings]
font='Monospace 14'
natural-copy-paste=false
prefer-dark-style=true
theme='dark'

[org/gnome/desktop/interface]
cursor-size=36
document-font-name='Open Sans 16'
font-name='Inter 12'
monospace-font-name='SourceCodeVF 16'
scaling-factor=uint32 1
text-scaling-factor=1.0

[org/gnome/desktop/wm/preferences]
titlebar-font='Cantarell Bold 18'

[org/gnome/font-manager]
compare-background-color='rgb(255,255,255)'
compare-foreground-color='rgb(0,0,0)'
compare-list=@as []
content-pane-position=187
google-fonts-background-color='rgb(255,255,255)'
google-fonts-foreground-color='rgb(0,0,0)'
language-filter-list=@as []
selected-category='7:1'
selected-font='13'
window-size=(900, 467)

[org/gnome/font-manager/font-viewer]
preview-font-size=16.0

[org/gnome/gedit/plugins/externaltools]
font='Monospace 14'

[org/gnome/libgnomekbd/indicator]
font-size=12

and thats's the Pantheon desktop sorted!

The Console

The TTY consoles was a bit trickier, but the Arch wiki came through, as it so often does, and now everything is a reasonable size, even on first boot, thanks to an /etc/vconsole.conf of:

FONT=ter-v28b

The Most Important Thing

But speaking of the terminal, easily my biggest accomplishment so far is that I've made a custom neofetch logo for Holo Shed OS:

neofetch

Since I'm no ASCII art guru, this was a good-sized project:

Enter my own solution: jp2a2neo.py, a ridiculously simple script to bridge the gap between the two programs:

starting with an image like:

starting image

and then running the command:

jp2a logo.png --color-depth=4 --width=48 | ./jp2a2neofetch.py > neofetch_logo.txt

resulted in an output I could then paste directly into the neofetch executable, yielding the awesome result you see above.

So yeah, I'm feeling pretty proud of myself.