I recently installed Debian 8 on a MacBook Pro with a hi-dpi display, or as Apple calls it, a Retina Display. I used a netinst installer, which is very small, but leaves you, right after the installation, with nothing but a Linux text console.

And the font is tiny!

Luckily, there’s a remedy for this. First, squint your eyes and login, and set the font directly with:

setfont Uni3-Terminus32x16

If you want to try other fonts, check under /usr/share/consolefonts.

To make that change permanent, edit /etc/default/console-setup and make the following three variables look like this:

CODESET="Uni3"
FONTFACE="Terminus"
FONTSIZE="32x16"

Now you can enjoy a readable font size and that will get applied on every boot.