VCONSOLE.CONF(5)

📦
version 259.10 · 11 versions
, in fedora 44

💅 VCONSOLE.CONF(5) — the vconsole.conf glow-up ✨

okay bestie, welcome to the vconsole.conf(5) page — it's the manpage for /etc/vconsole.conf, the configuration file for the virtual console 🌸

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

/etc/vconsole.conf

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

so like, the /etc/vconsole.conf file configures the virtual console — that's your keyboard mapping and your console font, periodt 💅. It gets applied at boot by udev using the 90-vconsole.rules file. And here's the fun part: you can safely mask this file if you wanna avoid this kind of initialization entirely 🫶.

The format of vconsole.conf is a newline-separated list of environment-like shell-compatible variable assignments, ignoring comments and empty lines ✨. Yes, it's possible to source the config from shell scripts — but ngl, beyond mere variable assignments no shell features are supported, which lets applications read the file without implementing a whole shell-compatible execution engine 😭. It's giving efficiency. See os-release(5) for a detailed description of the format 👑

heads up bestie: the kernel command line options vconsole.keymap=, vconsole.keymap_toggle=, vconsole.font=, vconsole.font_map=, vconsole.font_unimap= may be used to override the console settings at boot 🔥

Depending on the operating system, other configuration files might be checked for configuration of the virtual console as well — however only as fallback 🙈.

/etc/vconsole.conf is usually created and updated using systemd-localed.service(8). And localectl(1) may be used to instruct systemd-localed.service to query or update configuration 🦋.

🌈 OPTIONS 🌈

the following options are understood, bestie:

  • KEYMAP=, KEYMAP_TOGGLE= — configures the key mapping table for the keyboard 💫. KEYMAP= defaults to "us" if not set. As a special case, if "@kernel" is specified, no keymap will be loaded, i.e. the kernel's default keymap will be used. The KEYMAP_TOGGLE= can be used to configure a second toggle keymap and is by default unset 🎀.
  • FONT=, FONT_MAP=, FONT_UNIMAP= — configures the console font, the console map and the unicode font map 💖.

👑 KERNEL COMMAND LINE 👑

a few configuration parameters from vconsole.conf may be overridden on the kernel command line — main character energy fr fr:

  • vconsole.keymap=, vconsole.keymap_toggle= — overrides KEYMAP= and KEYMAP_TOGGLE= 🔥.

Added in version 232 ⭐.

  • vconsole.font=, vconsole.font_map=, vconsole.font_unimap= — overrides FONT=, FONT_MAP=, and FONT_UNIMAP= 🌸.

Added in version 232 ⭐.

🦋 EXAMPLE 🦋

Example 1. German keyboard and console 🇩🇪

/etc/vconsole.conf:

KEYMAP=de-latin1
FONT=eurlatgr

ate, no crumbs 💅

💜 SEE ALSO 💜

systemd(1), systemd-vconsole-setup.service(8), loadkeys(1), setfont(8), locale.conf(5), systemd-localed.service(8) 🫶

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this one's from systemd 259.10 and it's literally the VCONSOLE.CONF(5) page — go configure your console, ily, bye 😭💖✨

📦 where this page comes from