Showing More On Your Terminal
January 13, 2006 | 4 Comments
I have a monitor hooked to a FreedBSD system in my office that used to just show a login prompt all day long. Occassionally I’d sit at this machine and use the console, so the monitor was useful, but 99 out of 100 times I’d just SSH to the machine.
I decided to put this monitor to better use by continually outputting some log data to this screen. Specifically I’m outputting LDI synchronization events, which are XML. Initially I was pretty satisfied with this, except for one littel annoyance. XML is bulky, so I could only see one event on the screen at a time. I found that using scroll lock I could scroll back and see old events, but what I really wanted was either a smaller font or more lines.
Enter vidcontrol.
vidcontrol -i mode will show all the modes your display supports, but more importantly, vidcontrol 80x60 will change your terminal from the standard 80×25. In short, you’ll get more than double the number of lines.
More importantly, I won’t have to wade through the man pages next time I forget this command…
Thanks to Erich for the help on solving this one. He found some great docs on vidcontrol and vidfont, whihc I have since lost… However, here is the manpage on vidcontrol.
Tags: bsd, freebsd, ldi, linux, log, logging, monitor, monitoring, terminal, unix, vidcontrol, xml