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I am setting up Satnogs monitor, which needs a lot of unusual (unicode) symbols to show a world map with symbols. In order to get them, I was using a fork of yaft. On my raspberry pi, I could simply open this from a terminal, it would switch to a yaft non gui terminal, and then I could run it. However, I am setting it up on another raspberry pi and symbols are not working. Instead of trying to find the underlying issue I want to just use another terminal that works (konsole works on my main machine but that requires installing all of KDE). Are there any I can start from the command line and use without a window manager, and that support all symbols?

alex chamber
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  • I'd say that this had already been asked and answered at https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/177209/5132 and https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/196102/5132 five years ago, were it not that the proper question is How do I expand the fonts in yaft?. – JdeBP Jan 03 '20 at 15:14
  • There are two components to make this work: a terminal emulator capable of displaying unicode and a font supporting the glyphs. All nerdfonts should work. My personal choice is the tewi font. The yaft fork uses this font by default. So you don't have to generate it yourself. Make sure you're actually using the fork on your new RPi. – wose Jan 06 '20 at 19:33

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While not exactly what you're asking for, you could run a simple window manager like i3 then fullscreen a terminal emulator like st or xterm. This saves you installing an entire desktop environment and will be nice and light weight.

You can configure i3 to start a terminal in full screen or use dmenu to launch a program.

rusty shackleford
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  • You don't need a WM just to run XTerm in full screen size. Just run xterm -geometry 800x600 or whatever your display resolution is. But anyway, the OP is about the choice of a terminal, not WM. – Ruslan Jan 03 '20 at 15:12
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I've actually tried satnogs-monitor on Xubuntu, and XTerm does support all the symbols required to show a decent image. So just make sure you have xterm command available, and try running it like xterm -geometry WIDTHxHEIGHT, where WIDTH and HEIGHT are your screen resolution dimensions. From the window that appears, run satnogs-monitor as you would usually do.

Here's the command I tried when testing fully DE-less X11 session on Xubuntu 19.04 in QEMU (after having stopped the lightdm service):

startx /usr/bin/xterm -geometry 1024x768

Typing satnogs-monitor -s 175 in the terminal here gives me the following result:

screenshot

You'll just have to set it up to have black background and white foreground instead of the default colors. Namely, I have put the following into ~/.Xdefaults:

xterm*background: black
xterm*foreground: white

Now the result is

white-on-black screenshot

Ruslan
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  • "terminal only" and "non gui" do imply that the questioner is somewhat averse to using X as a whole. But maybe xe is not. – JdeBP Jan 03 '20 at 15:58
  • @JdeBP yeah that might be true. But in this case the question should be edited to specify the missing details. The mentioning of Konsole though implies that X-based solution is not really undesired. – Ruslan Jan 03 '20 at 16:05
  • I ended up just installing Kubuntu, but I'll try this. Thanks. – alex chamber Jan 04 '20 at 10:43