Making Gnome Terminal Look Like XTerm

DISCLAIMER: I spent about 2 hours of pasting stuff from Stack Overflow into my terminal before this, so if this doesn’t work for you, I’m sorry.

Turning Back the Font Clock on Gnome Terminal

I, for some unknown reason, am obsessed with the default font for XTerm on Kali Linux. I really really struggled to piece this puzzle together as a *nix noob, so I’m going to save someone out there the time.

Default XTerm Font

The default font in XTerm, at least on my Kali distro, is known as -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1. Now, what the hell does that mean? I have no idea, all I know is, there is a file in /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/fonts.alias which tell us that this is an alias for the font name 6x13.

So I searched inside /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/ and found the file: 6x13-ISO8850-1.pcf.gz.

I used gunzip on the file but was unable to install it in the default manner through the GUI by clicking install. (The installation fails and you get a message Install Failed; how depressing!)

Luckily, I found this Stack Overflow about font-manager failing to install fonts.

I went ahead and installed font-manager with apt-get install font-manager and then right-clicked 6x13-ISO8850-1.pcf and scrolled through my applications until I got to font-manager and installed it with that.

Next, just open terminal window and then select Edit –> Preferences –> check Custom font: Fixed SemiCondensed 10.

Now your terminal should look just like XTerm! Hopefully this saves someone 2 hours.