Unicode code points and new glyphs

[Lokaltog]

As discussed in Lokaltog/vim-powerline#128, all the glyphs are going to be moved to the Private Use Area for this version of Powerline. This also gives us the opportunity to include some new glyphs in this version. I'm thinking about a pencil shaped icon (file modified) and a window shaped icon (like two overlapping windows) for buffer number segments.

Since this project is going to be used for tmux and shell prompts as well, do you have any other ideas to new glyphs that we could include?

[Lokaltog]

Here's a free icon font we could grab a couple of glyphs from. Which ones do you think could be the most useful?

I'm also thinking about including a couple of more divider styles, at least one "sloped" style (a right triangle) and a S-kind of curved sloped style.

[derekbrokeit]

I'm really liking that this project got started. I had recently begun to think about just this kind of general version of a powerline lib. Thanks for starting it.

I'm not sure you want to add too many icons since most unicode fonts support a lot of helpful ones already (lock, cloud, etc.). Some quick thoughts I had while perusing this list are following. I'm not sure about the usefulness of any of these, but for the sake of consideration:

1. Upload/Download icons could be used to symbolize commits ahead/behind a vcs repository
2. clipboard, copy, paste, tags, etc. symbols could be used to display active/recent registers if possible

[Lokaltog]

I agree that we should limit the amount of icons, but I think adding 5-10 more icons that have a real purpose could improve the plugin quite a bit. I like your ideas about which icons should be included.

The problem with the existing unicode glyphs (e.g. the three existing pencil icons in the dingbats range) is that they don't exist in most fonts, and on my system the only font that has them looks like total crap (line art with too much detail for smaller font sizes, so they just become a blurry, unidentifiable mess). By providing a set of good icons meant for terminal rendering we have much more control over the appearance of prompts and statuslines.

Another question is: If we choose to include icons that already have assigned code points in Unicode, should we overwrite existing glyphs for fonts that already have them in order to use existing code points as they are intended, or should we add all the custom glyphs to the private use area?

[derekbrokeit]

You make a good point. In that case, it might be wise to consider including the padlock character, too. It is great for signifying that a buffer has no write access. It would be nice to ensure that all systems could take advantage of this without relying on the system-provided resources.

Also, I am not sure where others's stand, but I would personally be confused if there were two characters with the same purpose populating the screen. Some characters may not look great with mixed fonts, but in general, it would probably be good to overwrite the existing character. Some cases that I might caution against it would be the inclusion of a cloud character without all other weather related icons. Aesthetic problems could pop up when mixing unicode generated from different sources.

[KangOl]

You can use http://fontello.com/ to generate a custom font that only contain the wanted glyphs.

[Lokaltog]

The code points have been updated in 53fbfe1, and all the symbols have now been moved to the Private Use Area. I haven't decided whether to include more symbols or not, but I've seen a couple on fontello that I think could be useful to include in the font patcher. I'm a bit unsure about some of the icons because they may become very distorted when added to narrow coding fonts.

[Lokaltog]

No additional glyphs will be included with Powerline. The "FT" glyphs have also been removed.

[gdetrez]

Hi @Lokaltog, the link to https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-powerline/issues/128 that you mentioned in the issue above is now dead (deleted issue tracker?) Could you give a short summary of the discussion/reason why you moved the glyphs?

(And thanks for sharing this really cool code!)

[Lokaltog]

The glyphs were basically at invalid and already reserved unicode code points which caused issues in some terminal emulators.