Requirement: Chromebook, Common Sense, Commandline Ablity, 1 hour of time
Dear developers with a spare Chromebook lets inject a little personalization into your Crosh shell with custom fonts, the solarized theme, and extra secure shell options.
Also, keep in mind that the terms Chrosh
, Chrosh Window
, and Secure Shell
all refer to various versions and extentions built around the ChromeOS terminal. Settings that affect the ChromeOS terminal are global.
Adding fonts would is as easy as dropping a font file into the .fonts folder and changing a terminal setting. Sadly, we need to do a bit of work to get custom fonts working with ChromeOS.
Chromebook must be in developer mode. Once this is done, extra fonts can be added to ChromeOS's font folder located in /usr/local/share/fonts
.
- Create a file (ex.
font.conf
) on your Download folder on ChromeOS, use your favourite editor and copy the next bit into it and save. This will tell ChromeOS where to get the extra fonts that we will install later on.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<dir>/usr/local/share/fonts</dir>
</fontconfig>
-
Fire up the Crosh shell with
ctrl+alt+t
-
Get to your Download folder and copy your newly created font config file to
/home/chronos/user
. Justcp fon.config /home/chronos/user/.font.conf
-
Now you only need to download and copy any fonts (.ttf or .otf) into
/usr/local/share/fonts
. Just in case check that there's already a directory namedfonts
if there isn't any just create itmkdir /usr/local/share/fonts
. -
After you finished copying your font files just reboot your Chromebook. Newly fonts should appear in the droplist for the font selection and should be available to any app that it's running on ChromeOS including crosh.
Tip: there's a chance ChromeOS is not displaying the newly added fonts, you can induce a desktop crash and reload using chrome://inducebrowsercrashforrealz
to quickly reload without rebooting and checking if the fonts are working.
Fonts in .ttf format can be installed to the folder /usr/local/share/fonts/
Installing either the normal or powerline patched versions of your favorite monospaced fonts to the aforementioned folder is required for proper configuration of the font family settings in Secure Shell a bit latter.
https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline-fonts
To further customize our Crosh window, install both Secure Shell and the Crosh Window extentions from the Chrome Web Store.
ChromeOS apps
menu > right click on the Secure Shell icon > select options
Change the terminal settings as you see fit. Pay special attention to:
Keep in mind ChromeOS will only load the first avaliable font that you specified in the font-family field's comma-separated list. If you wan to use a custom font make sure you add it as the first entry. To get the name of the font you want to use, refer to the 'Powerline Font Family' column in the table on this page. For example, if you want to use Ubuntu Mono, add "Ubuntu Mono derivative Powerline",
to the front of the 'font-family' field.
Since most(possibly all) powerline fonts are slighly smaller than default font, you may wish to bump the size up from 15 to a modestly larger 16 or 17.
Base16 is a wonderland of beauty for your terminal.
It's a bit tricky to set up properly on the Chromebook. This page has instructions on setting up base16 for Crosh and making the colors work with vim + tmux inside your chroot.
It's almost criminal how easy it is to install solarized for Crosh.
-
Download a solarized prefs.js file. Two good options are:
I'm including the code for the prefs.js file I used for convenience.
// Disable bold
term_.prefs_.set('enable-bold', false)
// Use this for Solarized Dark
term_.prefs_.set('background-color', "#002b36");
term_.prefs_.set('foreground-color', "#839496");
// Solarized Colors
term_.prefs_.set('color-palette-overrides', [
'#073642',
'#dc322f',
'#859900',
'#b58900',
'#268bd2',
'#d33682',
'#2aa198',
'#eee8d5',
'#002b36',
'#cb4b16',
'#586e75',
'#657b83',
'#839496',
'#6c71c4',
'#93a1a1',
'#fdf6e3'
]);
- Open the Chrome Javascript Console
ctrl+shift+j
- Paste the contents of your solarized
prefs.js
file into the console - Hit
enter
Loading a Crosh Window based Ubuntu 14.04 Chroot is the best way to make use of the customizations.
- dnschneid/crouton with
sudo sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -r trusty -t cli-extra
For powerline patched font use in vim:
- add bling/vim-airline to vim
- edit your
.vimrc
to includelet g:airline_powerline_fonts = 1
For powerline patched font use in tmux:
- Install
ZSH shell
,oh-my-zsh
, and set thezsh-theme
toagnoster
This instructions are possible thanks to https://gist.github.com/aaronhalford and the guys at https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=320364. Thanks for reading!
I had to use a bind mount to get
.fonts.conf
picked up