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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](https://www.nerdfonts.com/) should work. My personal choice is the [tewi](https://github.com/lucy/tewi-font) 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