[smc-discuss] Terminal emulator that can display Malayalam

Subin Siby subins2000 at gmail.com
Wed Aug 4 00:00:11 PDT 2021


I had the same requirement. Heard Konsole got better with Malayalam, but
I'm on Ubuntu 18, so can't upgrade it.

I ended up using a terminal emulator in the browser
https://github.com/IonicaBizau/web-term

XTerm.js is a popular browser based terminal emulation library BUT it no
more have complex ligature support. XTerm is used by VSCode. web-term
doesn't use XTerm.

XTerm is in the process of including complex ligature support, but it's
been a while. Track the progress here:
https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js/issues/958

One that's completed, VSCode future versions would have proper Malayalam
rendering in its terminal I believe.

I don't know what's the status currently with Konsole. Rajeesh says there's
still some minor issues(?)
https://rajeeshknambiar.wordpress.com/2020/05/19/complex-text-shaping-fixed-in-konsole-20-08/

On Wed, Aug 4, 2021, 8:06 AM Julin S <julinshaji01 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi.
>
> Is there a terminal emulator for linux that can display Malayalam
> characters
> properly?
>
> I tried gnome-terminal (3.28.2) and konsole (17.12.3) on an Ubuntu 18.04
> computer.
>
> Display is almost perfect in konsole except that the letter ന്‍ (a
> 'chillaksharam') shows up as 'ന്<200d>' in it.
>
> In gnome-terminal's rendering, adjacent letters overlap, making the text
> illegible.
>
> My locale is utf8 and the text displays properly in GUI text editors. I can
> even create files with Malayalam names which are displayed properly in the
> gui
> file explorer.So I suppose this problem is not because of the absence of a
> suitable font.
>
> And the following packages are already installed:
>
>  - fonts-smc
>  - fonts-samyak-mlym
>  - fonts-mlym
>  - fonts-lohit-mlym
>
> Does anyone know of a way to display Malayalam text properly in terminal?
> Using
> any terminal emulator for linux?
>
> Thanks.
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