TTY Setup

I’ve started to use the Linux TTY as my standard terminal instead of using a terminal emulator like xterm or xfce4-terminal. It is incredibly low latency compared to using a terminal emulator inside X, and feels much more distraction-free. To make things comfortable, I’ve needed to make a couple adaptations.

Change the terminal font.

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

I use TerminusBold at 14x28 font size.

Switch capslock and escape.

To switch capslock and escape at the tty level, I use loadkeys which changes how to kernel interprets the keymap. My ~/.Loadkeys file looks like this:

# switch Caps_Lock and Escape *before* starting X
keycode 1 = Caps_Lock
keycode 58 = Escape

Adjust the monitor and keyboard backlights.

The current brightness for the backlight of my monitor is here: /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness It turns out that 9000 is a lot of brightness, and 1000 is a little. To adjust it, you can do something like:

echo 100 | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness

My laptop, an Asus ZenBook UX333F, has backlights in the keyboard keycaps. They’re sometimes handy at night. For them, 0 is off, and 10 is full-blast.

echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/class/leds/asus::kbd_backlight/brightness

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Published: Jul 10, 2023

Last Modified: Nov 20, 2023

TTY Setup

Change the terminal font.

Switch capslock and escape.

Adjust the monitor and keyboard backlights.

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