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don.joey
Asked: 2017-01-07 06:58:27 +0800 CST

How can I configure the steps of font size changes in the terminal?

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How can I configure the steps of font size changes in the terminal? I now use 10pt and the next step when using keyboard shortcuts is too big. How can I configure the step size?

command-line

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The script below will set the font size, of all profiles at once, in steps of 0.5. You will have to see if this is sufficient for you; the terminal does not react on all steps.

    In my case, there was a visible change from 

    10 --> 10.5 --> 11

    10.5

    enter image description here

    11

    enter image description here

    but then increasing from

    11 --> 11.5

    had no effect until increasing once more to

    12

    enter image description here

    This is probably related to the font size, in relation to the window size, which does not allow floats since you are using a monotype font in the terminal.

    Nevertheless, the script offers the sizes that exist in this situation.

    The script

    #!/usr/bin/env python3
import subprocess
import sys
import ast

"""
Copyright (C) 2016  Jacob Vlijm
https://launchpad.net/~vlijm/+contactuser
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or any later version. This
program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR
A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You
should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this
program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
"""

arg = sys.argv[1]

k = ["/org/gnome/terminal/legacy/profiles:/:", "/use-system-font", "font"]

def get(cmd):
    return subprocess.check_output(cmd).decode("utf-8").strip()

def run(cmd):
    subprocess.Popen(cmd)

def set_size(profile):
    def_font = k[0]+profile+k[1]
    # first set use default font to false
    run(["dconf", "write", def_font, "false"])
    # read the current font
    currfont = ast.literal_eval(get(["dconf", "read", k[0]+profile+"/"+k[2]])).split()
    # read the current size
    currsize = float(currfont[-1])
    # set the newsize
    if arg == "up":
        newsize = currsize+0.5
    elif arg == "down":
        newsize = currsize-0.5
    run(["dconf", "write", k[0]+profile+"/"+k[2], "'"+currfont[0]+" "+str(newsize)+"'"])

# get profiles
prf = k[0][:-1]+"list"
# set fontsize up/down 0.5
for p in ast.literal_eval(get(["dconf", "read", prf])):
    set_size(p)

    How to use

    1. Copy the script into an empty file, save it as terminalfont.py

    2. Test- run the script by the commands:

      python3 /path/to/terminalfont.py up

      to increase the font size, and

      python3 /path/to/terminalfont.py down

      to decrease the font size

    3. If all works fine, add both commands to shortcuts

    Explanation

    Unfortunately, there is no key available in gsettings to set the font size of the terminal. We need to use dconf directly to read and edit settings.

    We can first fetch the list of profiles though by the command:

    dconf read /org/gnome/terminal/legacy/profiles:/list

    Once we have the list of profiles, the script then first disables using the default font (per profile):

    dconf write /org/gnome/terminal/legacy/profiles:/:b1dcc9dd-5262-4d8d-a863-c897e6d979b9/use-system-font false

    where b1dcc9dd-5262-4d8d-a863-c897e6d979b9 is the profile's id

    Subsequently we read the current font & size with the command:

    dconf read /org/gnome/terminal/legacy/profiles:/:b1dcc9dd-5262-4d8d-a863-c897e6d979b9/font

    ...we parse ot the font size, add or subtract 0.5, and set the new size by:

    dconf write /org/gnome/terminal/legacy/profiles:/:b1dcc9dd-5262-4d8d-a863-c897e6d979b9/font 'Monospace 14.0'

    Note

    As mentioned, if this is sufficient for you can only be tested by you. If it doesn't however, I am afraid we cannot fix it, because the font size has to be in a certain proportion to the terminal's window on a mono-type font.

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