e-mail away.
There are also the "traditional" modes that the video card supports too. These are harder to force but can be used just as well.
80 Characters Wide and 25 lines tall, is the default text based console for most. But you can get to 40 Characters wide and 12 lines tall on most current Video Cards... yes even the $700 nVidia cards.
Matrox seems to be the best supported for Linux in this regard, but now that S3 is back in the Video card realm, they have some nice offerings.