Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is quite a pleasant mono-spaced font that I set in all editors. Yesterday I suddenly felt an urge to have the same clear font for dos prompt.

Dos-prompt -> Properties. OK, why are Lucida Console and raster fonts the only choices?

How to change it? I’ll go brute with that. Choose raster fonts, regedit, export all to before.reg. Choose “Lucida Console”, regedit, export all to after.reg.

Let’s compare in a professional manner. First choice, cleardiffmrg.exe within ClearCase - seems that a diff on 54Mb files is too much for the poor thing. Windiff instantly tells the files are different, since the dates is different. What a smart piece of software! That’s all for the differences from windiff. Simple fc /N /U. Wow! It found it!

***** before.reg
430356: [HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-1715567821-2049760794-725345543-1004\
\Console\%SystemRoot%_System32_cmd.exe]
430357: "FontSize"=dword:000c0000
430358: "FontFamily"=dword:00000036
430359: "FontWeight"=dword:00000190
430360: "FaceName"="Lucida Console"
430361:
***** AFTER.REG
430356: [HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-1715567821-2049760794-725345543-1004\Console\%SystemRoot%_System32_cmd.exe]
430357: "FontSize"=dword:000c0010
430358: "FontFamily"=dword:00000030
430359: "FontWeight"=dword:00000190
430360: "FaceName"="Terminal"
430361:
*****

Hmmm… somehow it’s not very useful. Changing the key doesn’t make any visible difference. Brute force is just that - brute and mindless. So regedit -> Search for “Lucida Console”. And here’s something:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\
\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont\0

Changing the value from “Lucida Console” to “Bitstream Vera Sans Mono”, changed the Menu, I could see it in preview, but the font didn’t change. WTF? A little googling and here is the solution:

I just needed to restart Windows! How lame of me! When it was done everything worked correctly…

So, my faithul readers (0nlin3 p0k3r and t3×4s h0ld3m ;-)), here’s the recipe:

Set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\
\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont\0 to your fav mono font, restart and that’s it.

Safety Disclaimer: What you see here is an account of my pointless errands in the winxp registry, It is not a procedure for you to follow. Playing around with Windows Registry is risky, so don’t try it.

Update:
I changed the sp4mm3r names to 3l33t (see next post) Let’s see what happens.