Why?

Why do you want to use fancy symbols in your standard monospace font? Obviously to have a fancy prompt like mine :-)

And because when you live in a terminal a symbol can convey more informations in less space creating a dense and beautiful (for those who have a certain aesthetic taste) informative workspace

Heavily inspired by https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-powerline and the relative patch script from Kim Silkebækken (kim.silkebaekken+vim@gmail.com)

Patching vs Fallback

There are two strategies that could be used to have symbols in a terminal

• you can take a bunch of symbol fonts, your favourite monospace font and merge them together (patching strategy)
• you can use a feature of freetype2 font engine, basically you can say that whenever the current font doesn't have a glyph for a certain codepoint then fallback and go look into other fonts (fallback strategy)

Initially I used the first strategy, later I switched to the second. The patching strategy it's more reliable and portable, the problem is that you need to patch every monospace font you want to use and patching a single font it's a lot of manual fine tuning. If you want you can find all previous patched fonts in patching-strategy branch

Font Maps

• Wouldn't be cool to be able to call glyphs/symbols by name (ex. AWESOME_LONG_ARROW_DOWN) instead of by codepoint (ex. \uf175)? This is what font maps are meant for, for every symbol font in ./fonts directory you can find a map file in ./build directory that maps each glyph's name to its codepoint in a way that is understandable by most shells

Included Fonts

In this repository you can find a bunch of fonts that I use as symbol fonts with the relative font maps

• Font Awesome: ./fonts/fontawesome-webfont.ttf, for further informations and license see http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome
• Octicons: ./fonts/octicons-regular.ttf, for further informations and license see https://github.com/blog/1135-the-making-of-octicons
• Pomicons: ./fonts/pomicons-regular.ttf, for further informations and license see https://github.com/gabrielelana/pomicons

How to install

• (OSX) if you don't have fontcache installed, one way to get it is to run brew install fontconfig
• copy all the fonts from ./build directory to ~/.fonts directory
• run fc-cache -fv ~/.fonts to let freetype2 know of those fonts
• customize the configuration file ./config/10-symbols.conf replacing PragmataPro with the name of the font you want to use in the terminal (I will add more fonts in the future so that this step could be skippable)
• copy the above configuration file to ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d directory

License

MIT