x3270 Terminal Emulator fonts

I really needed larger fonts for the Master the Mainframe course. I used the default x3270 many times using the Hercules emulator but for some reason the smaller font really bothered me in this course. Watched “Setting up x3270 on Linux”, a YouTube video where a guy installed with apt then easily changed the font size using options>fonts. However my x3270 install on Linux Mint also using apt I was not able to select another font. As a matter of fact all font boxes were greyed and nothing appeared to be selected. So I installed xfonts-x3270-misc and fonts-3270. It’s possible that only one of these was needed. But it still didn’t work. However after a reboot I was able to select a larger font.

Note: If you choose screen size 5 (132×27) you can view listings easily!

Manjaro has the same problem, and I already installed fonts-3270. So that makes me believe the solution that worked for Mint was installing xfonts-x3270-misc. Except those fonts don’t exist in the Pamac GUI, Never fear I found another way that worked when I was working on Mint that also works on Manjaro! It takes a few more steps…but it works! From options>fonts>iso10646-1>misc-fixed>(choose your font)

After you have the screen looking like you want, select file>Save Changed Options if you want it to become the default.

I was seriously considering buying a 3270 emulator. But choices are few on Linux. I did see a ‘Lite’ version but it was $80. That outside of consideration for me. I had a similar gripe about Sublime Text. My price point for a nice utility type program is more around $30. I would have spent that in a heartbeat rather than googling and trying many things. I wouldn’t have even have tried very hard looking for another solution at that price. But $80? Especially in this open source era. I’ve seen nice 3270 emulators on MS-Windows that dynamically resize by merely dragging the edges/corners. I’m sure there are other nice features that a paid product has over x3270. But the main thing I was looking for was larger fonts. Anyhoo I can live with the solutions I described and can find other things to spend $80 on.