Conemu: Just a gentle reminder: Conemu's font settings only apply to Conemu, not Putty, Cygwin, or BUW

[jrcharney]

Not so much an issue, but probably something I should post to help @Maximus5 out that has been bothering me (and I bet a lot of other people) for some time was the fact that when you integrate other applications such as Putty, Cygwin, or Bash o Ubuntu on Windows (BUW) is that the fonts settings in ConEmu are not applied to tabs that have integrated into Conemu. You have to go to THOSE applications and make changes to fonts.

Since I couldn't figure out how to write this helpful information onto the ConEmu wiki or documentation, I decided to contribute this information here. So, my apologies in advanced if I decided to forego reading all that stuff that was in this box initially.

This actually explains why when you open Conemu to a Cmder command (which Conemu is set up for), you get 16 Consolas (10pt Consolas in PuTTY) as the font, however if you haven't set up Putty or BUW with similar settings, things will look different.

First, how to set up the font in ConEmu

Conemu's font settings are set in the Settings... (Win+Alt+P) menu when you select the Main item from the sidebar. This is straightforward.

But what about PuTTY?

PuTTY is a little bit complicated as each session for some reason uses different settings instead of sharing the same settings. Perhaps the guys who made PuTTY were thinking "Let's not make it look confusing when we have more than one PuTTY session open such that the user can set the default font color to white on one terminal, green on another terminal, and yellow on another terminal."

So you need to load a set of session settings by clicking on the Sessions item, select a session (Default Session would be a good place to start), click Load, then click on the Windows -> Appearance item and in the Font settings, click the Change... button and change the font there. Select your font and press OK. _Then_ go back to Sessions and click Save to apply those changes to your session settings. You must to do this for each set of session settings. When you open a new Putty session in Conemu these changes will be applied.

Bash on Ubuntu

Old habits seem to die hard at Microsoft. While I preferred to give Bash on Ubuntu on Windows (or as I've just been calling it BUW) since I've been more used to working with Linux Minut (an Ubuntu derivative) and Raspbian (Debian for Raspberry Pi) the past couple of years over Cygwin which seems to get updates at a turtle's pace, I decided to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt when it came to using Linux and decided to join the Windows 10 Home Insider Preview (Win10 HIP or just HIP).

Firstly, if you want to get BUW, you must understand the risks of using HIP. HIP is their developer edition, however if you are like me and just want to use BUW and not screw with anything else that actually could break Windows, then give HIP a try. Just remember, with new features come new responsibility that Microsoft will blame you for even if they break something you didn't touch. So be sure to have hard drive large enough to support a recovery rollback and to back up your stuff on a regular basis. You know, all that stuff you should be doing but probably never do. You've been warned. ;-)

By the way, don't bother with tech support if you mention you are using Win10 HIP. They'll tell you a stupid answer like "You shouldn't have used HIP to begin with" or "You should reinstall Windows without HIP" when in all honestly, you should NEVER listen to them when they tell you this because for some reason their Tech Support philosophy is "If there is no problem, there is no problem, there for if you don't do it you won't have that problem". Way to "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" your way out of a problem, MS Tech Support!

At any rate, using HIP has paid off, although when you realize something isn't working that would normally work in Linux, generally that thing works again when the next Windows 10 HIP update comes out.

From my experience, you should also install @rprichard's WSL Bridge which was described in the BUW instructions.

To change the font here, as well a CMD and Power Shell, you'll need to apply the same settings to the Settings as well as the Default in the upper left icon menu which you need to select and open one of those two options. Click the Font tab. The font size appears to be set in pixels rather than point. So instead of 10pt, you will likely need to click on 16, at least that's the case of Consolas, which is the font Cmder uses. Press OK. Apply to both Settings and Default.

These settings will be applied when you open a new BUW tab in Cmder. There is one thing I have noticed with using BUW inside of Cmdr and that is the line spacing seems to be slightly more smushed together than when you use Cmder or PuTTY inside of ConEmu. I'm not sure if it is something caused by WSL Bridge or something else, but this issue is negligible enough that I can live with it.

Follow Up RE: WSL Bridge

WHOOPS! It turns out WSL uses a complete different set of settings than BUW itself.

These are the actual settings for WSL. Still a bit of a spacing issue between lines but nothing to worry about.

Transparent Backgrounds and Color Pallets

Another aethetic feature about Cmder's that I like is the ability to apply transparency settings on Cmder, but when you use them with BUW or PuTTY, they are not homogeneous. My initial though was on BUW and PuTTY which don't have transparency, but it was actually Cmder which was using a different color palette than PuTTY and BUW. This can be resolved by setting all the tabs to use the same color pallets. On each tab, right click and select View (Pallets) then select "Default Windows Scheme". Transparency settings will be applied universally. (I like setting mine somewhere around 80%, if there was a number on that slider control) This is applied in the Setting menu under Features -> Transparency. It is important to note that this setting will effect the transparency of the application's GUI as well as the background. (Hopefully someday ConEmu will figure this out such that the background can be set to 80% and the GUI can be set to a different value. Bonus accolades if the GUI transparency (and maybe the background transparency) can be set to different values if the mouse hovers over the applications. It would give kind of an XWindows feeling if when the mouse was not hovering over the app the GUI transparency would be reduced to 0 or 10% and rose to 90% to 100% if the mouse hovered over the application. Similar effects would be applied to the background especially if the window was set to stay on top of all other windows. Just some thoughts I had.)

Sadly, color pallets can't be applied to BUW or PuTTY. Hopefully, ConEmu will include some feature some day to override this issue especially since the Mac OSX Terminal can apply this. On the other hand, it would go hand in hand with the font settings this message addressed today.

At any rate, I hope this helps everyone. Keep up the good work, @Maximus5!

[Maximus5]

ConEmu would never customize any ChildGui application.
Users should use real console applications instead of their graphical analogs.
Don't you expect ConEmu changes, for example, sprites/graphics/background of computer games if they are running in window mode inside ConEmu? Quake for example? ;-)

[Maximus5]

@jrcharney Well, proper location of this article would be in the ChildGui page. However personally I don't like ChildGui inside ConEmu because they are not console applications and ConEmu has no control over them.
I run WSL, cygwin bash, git for windows directly in ConEmu tabs without third-party wrappers like PuTTY or mintty.

[jrcharney]

In regard to the question in the first comment: No. Namely because the apps I'm using don't have them as I do understand the limitation. Unless my comprehension of this question is unclear, I hadn't intended on using anything that had graphics in it.

In regards to the second comment: If the boss likes PuTTY, I'll use PuTTY. That's not saying I don't know how to use SSH. I could do it like you did, but we're kinda using one of those PSK setups where using PuTTY was easier. I had almost forgot how different WSL and BUW were in that WSL allows for BUW to work in ConEmu whereas you just can't run BUW in ConEmu without a bridge.

[ghost]

Is real console the same thing as terminal emulator? Why not call it native terminal emulator , or something like that.

[Maximus5]

Why not call it native terminal emulator , or something like that.

I named "real console" so long ago to distinguish it from "virtual console" where ConEmu draws the text. I dislike the "native terminal emulator" term, because it's not clear is it ConEmu or "conhost".

• https://conemu.github.io/en/RealConsole.html
• https://conemu.github.io/en/VirtualConsole.html

I hadn't intended on using anything that had graphics in it.

But you do. PuTTY, mintty and others "had graphics in it". They paints graphics instead of "writing" text data (ASCII or Unicode) to "standard output".

If the boss likes PuTTY, I'll use PuTTY.

That's pity but understandable.

I had almost forgot how different WSL and BUW were

Hm? WSL (Windows subsystem for Linux) and BUW (Bash on Ubuntu on Windows) are two sides of the same coin.

Also, WSLbridge is not a ChildGui or mintty, it's a real console application.
https://conemu.github.io/en/BashOnWindows.html