Custom font (to be able to put custom icons)

[joonas-fi]

Use cases:

• Replace my stupid muscle and candy bar icons with CPU (chip) and RAM module icon

[joonas-fi]

Patcher available from: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts

Example font download: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto

Run:

docker run --rm -v /tmp/fonts/in:/in -v /tmp/fonts/out:/out nerdfonts/patcher

Outcome:

/tmp/fonts
├── in
│   ├── LICENSE.txt
│   ├── Roboto-Black.ttf
│   ├── Roboto-BlackItalic.ttf
│   ├── Roboto-Bold.ttf
│   ├── Roboto-BoldItalic.ttf
│   ├── Roboto-Italic.ttf
│   ├── Roboto-Light.ttf
│   ├── Roboto-LightItalic.ttf
│   ├── Roboto-Medium.ttf
│   ├── Roboto-MediumItalic.ttf
│   ├── Roboto-Regular.ttf
│   ├── Roboto-Thin.ttf
│   └── Roboto-ThinItalic.ttf
└── out
    ├── RobotoNerdFont-Black.ttf
    ├── RobotoNerdFont-BlackItalic.ttf
    ├── RobotoNerdFont-Bold.ttf
    ├── RobotoNerdFont-BoldItalic.ttf
    ├── RobotoNerdFont-Italic.ttf
    ├── RobotoNerdFont-Light.ttf
    ├── RobotoNerdFont-LightItalic.ttf
    ├── RobotoNerdFont-Medium.ttf
    ├── RobotoNerdFont-MediumItalic.ttf
    ├── RobotoNerdFont-Regular.ttf
    ├── RobotoNerdFont-Thin.ttf
    └── RobotoNerdFont-ThinItalic.ttf

[joonas-fi]

CLI options

Are not discoverable with --help, mainly visible from the README

Icon index

Search icons from here: https://www.nerdfonts.com/cheat-sheet

Patcher adds by default:

• Seti-UI + Custom Set
  • No interesting icons here
• Heavy Angle Brackets Set
• Devicons Set
  • No interesting icons here
• (tl;dr: by default most icons are not included, you've to add them as CLI options)

Icon sets and code points: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/wiki/Glyph-Sets-and-Code-Points

Observations

• Doesn't seem to contain feature where you can opt-in to only add chosen icons
• Performance: the minute you start adding large # of glyphs (such as --materialdesignicons), the process takes considerably longer time. That means that if you have lots of variations (see Roboto {Black,BlackItalic,Bold,BoldItalic,...} from above) it's going to take minutes and minutes.
  • Conclusion: don't process a directory but a single chosen .ttf file
  • This would also be mitigated by the "opt-in to only add chosen icons" feature that is missing

Which font to patch?

System fonts are in: /usr/share/fonts/truetype

Let's patch Fira Code from /usr/share/fonts/truetype/firacode/FiraCode-Regular.ttf:

How to patch

docker run --rm -v /usr/share/fonts/truetype/firacode/FiraCode-Regular.ttf:/in/FiraCode-Regular.ttf:ro -v /tmp/fonts/out:/out nerdfonts/patcher --materialdesignicons

Copy the font and rebuild font cache:

sudo cp /tmp/fonts/out/FiraCodeNerd*-Regular.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/firacode/
sudo fc-cache -f -v

How to test

Open text editor (e.g. Mousepad), if you patched FiraCode then the patched font name will be FiraCode Nerd Font

Copy the "Icon" from the cheat sheet - that will be the text "symbol" that gets converted to the icon:

[joonas-fi]

End result is starting to look much nicer: