Improve Vista’s Console Font

If you are a Windows power user, I’m sure that like me, you spend at least some of your time with either a command line console (cmd.exe) or Windows PowerShell open. By default, the Windows console uses horrible, non anti-aliased Raster Fonts for displaying text. These fonts, while functional, aren’t very easy on the eyes.

If you don’t like the Raster fonts, there has always been the option of using Lucinda Console. This option is much better, but still lacks the smoothness that I like in a console font. Perhaps I’m spoiled from some of the awesome monospace fonts available in Linux, but I wanted something better for my command prompt in Vista than these two options. I did some searching around the ‘net to find out if there was a way to have another option besides these two, and I found my answer!

With Windows Vista, there is a new monospace font included called ‘Consolas’ which is a huge improvement over both the Raster Fonts, and the already included ‘Lucinda Console’. If you don’t have Vista, the Consolas font is also available for download from Microsoft. Consolas is part of a new family of fonts released with Windows Vista (and Office 2007) known as C* fonts. These font’s all start with “C” and are designed to make the best use of ClearType and are designed to be as readable as possible with ClearType turned on.

So, if you would like to try out Consolas in your cmd.exe (and PowerShell) sessions, open up a Command Prompt that has administrative privileges and execute the following command:

reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont" /v 00 /d Consolas

Alternatively, you can find and edit the following key in your Windows Registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont

Add a key value with the name 00 and put Consolas in the data field.

Now, you will need to logoff and log back on, and reopen cmd.exe (or Windows PowerShell). Now you can go into the properties and select Consolas as your default font (I use 16pt myself).

Special thanks to:

Amit Agarwal, Jeff Lynch, Bill Hill, and Bryn Spears of the IEBlog as this post is a combination of information I gathered from all three locations. Thanks guys!