I’ve fiddled around with BitchX on my Mac the other day, and one question that came up was: how can I display all characters correctly?Google says this question is asked once in a decade, so I’m happyto give an answer for2016.
BitchX screenshot
Installing BitchX is easy: brew install bitchx, but starting it in your terminal application (you should useiTerm2) just looks like a mess. You need the right fonts now:get them here. Older guys (like me) will recognize old friends immediately in this ‘Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack’. It features a lot of fonts by various producers, including IBM, Tandy, Amstrad, and others. Download these fonts, unzip them and install at least one of them. I’d recommend the IBM VGA9 ‘Plus’ font ‘PxPlus_IBM_VGA9.ttf’ (take the ‘Plus’ version, because you’ll need the extended ASCII symbols).
It’suseful to set up a new profile in iTerm2 for running BitchX. Hit ‘Profiles’ in the Preferences dialog, add a new profile and enter something like this:
/path/to/BitchX <your-nick><irc-server>
as command in the ‘Command’ section of the ‘General’ tab. In the’Text’ tab select the font you’ve just downloaded and installed. It’s PxPlus IBM VGA9 with a size of 16pt. (Everything else will look bad.) You will only need this one, so you might uncheck the ‘Use a different font for non-ASCII text’ option. Inthe ‘Terminal’ tab select Latin-US (DOS)as for Character Encoding (actually it’s ISO-Latin-1, but this didn’t work for some reason) and rxvt as Terminal Type. That’s all. Call that session and enjoy your colorful BitchX session!
