I'm installing a TTY-only instance of Debian alongside my normal desktop OS for a distraction free writing setup. I end up watching jewtube or beating my meat way too often, so I want a dual-boot setup where I'll need to restart my PC to access a GUI. I'm also wanting to become more familiar with the coreutils, and scripting, so this seems like prescriptive solution.

I don't know anything about TTYs, ASCII, UTF-8, encoding, etc. Nothing. I just know I can't scroll up and look at the terminal output history like I can in a terminal emulator(tmux would solve this, right?), and it's black and white, and the "resolution", font, font size, etc. are fixed. Assuming there will be more surprises, since I've only ever used modern terminal emulators, never an actual tty.

I'd like to be able to adjust the resolution, font, font size and colors. I know I'm limited to 16 colors, and that terminal fonts aren't like system fonts, but that's about it.

What should I be looking into and taking into consideration before I attempt this?