Have a nice looking font in my urxvt... Pretty easy actually, I can't believe it took me so long... The thing is... terminals can only display monospace fonts properly. Helvetica is very nice of course but try it and you'll have large gaps between letters... OK then... time to choose a monospace font...
So which ones are available on my system ? gtkfontsel or xfontsel give me these :

  • -*-dejavu sans mono-medium-r-normal-*-13-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
  • -*-nimbus mono l-regular-r-*-*-17-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
  • -*-tlwgmono-medium-r-*-*-18-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
  • -*-monouralic-regular-r-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
  • -bitstream-terminal-medium-r-*-*-*-140-100-100-*-*-iso8859-1
  • -*-freemono-medium-r-normal-*-15-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
  • -bitstream-bitstream vera sans mono-medium-r-*-*-17-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

But none of them really made it for me and my sweet urxvt... After a while I stumbled upon LIBERATION MONO... Love at first sight? Probably... but how can my jealous system understand? No matter what I did... I even tried to put the .ttf files in /usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation... In vain...



Liberation Mono Regular in Debian Testing (Desktop)


Then I learned that Xft could integrate ttf fonts in graphical applications such as xterm, urxvt etc... Heaven... All you have to do is simply add the following in your ~/.Xdefaults :
URxvt*font: xft:Liberation Mono:style=Regular:pixelsize=15

And put the ttf files in your ~/.fonts of course.



Liberation Mono Bold in Debian Testing (Laptop)


Strangely the font aspect is not the same on my laptop... maybe this is linked to different video cards? To tell you the truth, this suits me just fine... I'll probably won't modify my urxvt configuration for quite a few... years? Of course I use the bold version on the laptop but that's not the difference I mean...



Ubuntu Something (Desktop)


This one is from a friend using Ubuntu... Seems like a font called 'Monospace' is just like Liberation Mono? And it's already auto-installed... But is it really the same? I don't think so...