The process of using 40/50 row vga text modes is pretty cumbersome now: wsfontload -h 8 -e ibm /usr/share/misc/pcvtfonts/vt220l.808 wsconscfg -dF 1 wsconscfg -t 80x50 1
I just reported a bug and a fix with font corruption, but I want to propose a few usability improvements that I am interested in hacking on. Not caring about extended VGA text modes is a perfectly reasonable position today, so wave me off if this wouldn't be desirable. Including a default 8x8 and 8x10 font in the kernel to avoid the need to wsfontload would be nice, and allow it to be used for early boot. Is 4.5k too much for a fringe feature? 2k for just the 8x8? Wsconscfg could allow the -dF options at the same time as the type and emul options, allowing an existing screen to be deleted and reconfigured in a single step. Better yet would be to allow the screen type to be reconfigured on the fly without deleting it at all. If that is done, then wscons could support ctrl-alt-+/- to dynamically change text modes. In the modern world, it would be really nice to have similar ability to change the fonts used by the framebuffer based consoles to get denser text modes. Wsconsctl can report the display.fontwidth/height, but can't change it. Use of different spleen fonts could be defined as a "type" like the VGA modes and take advantage of the other changes.
