ghostty falls back to default font after upgrade to 3.4.0

[hrzlgnm]

System details

AMD Ryzen 5 7600X, RTX 4060 Ti, Omarchy 3.4.0

What's wrong?

After the update ghostty falls back to using the default font, which is JetBrains Mono NF.

Workaround: After selecting the previous font again in the Meta+Alt+Space Style -> Font it is applied again.

[hrzlgnm]

I'm not sure whether I've applied a font yet using the Menu.

I had the font set in the ghostty config.
Perhaps the user set config should be preferred.
When executing ghostty +show-config, the font was even shown:

 ghostty +show-config | grep font-fam
font-family = RecMonoCasual Nerd Font
font-family-bold = RecMonoCasual Nerd Font
font-family-italic = RecMonoCasual Nerd Font
font-family-bold-italic = RecMonoCasual Nerd Font

But when executing ghostty in another terminal, it was clearly loading the JetBrains Mono NF font according to the output.

[hrzlgnm]

After setting the font using Style->Font back to "JetBrains Mono NF" the config is also updated, but after setting the font in the config back to "RecMonoCasual Nerd Font", ghostty just ignores the setting and uses "JetBrains Mono NF" instead.

[avenkidur]

I observed the same behavior.

I did try editing via ghostty +edit-config the file ~/.config/ghostty/config.
Changing the font-size did work via that file, or an optional omarchy theme in config-file = ?"~/.config/omarchy/current/theme/ghostty.conf"

I tried multiple font-family values and none were reflected in ghostty.
The only font it shows is the default font embedded within Ghostty which is JetBrains Mono

Zero Configuration Philosophy
Ghostty is designed to work out of the box with no configuration for most users. Ghostty has sensible defaults, embeds a default font (JetBrains Mono), has built-in nerd fonts, and more
see Ghostty Option Reference for ~/.config/ghostty/config documentation
see ghostty +list-fonts to see the exact font-family names Ghostty recognizes

[djneades]

Claude Code traced the root cause of this. What follows is its explanation and suggested fix.

It looks like the culprit is the fontconfig rule that omarchy-font-set writes to ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf:

<match target="pattern">
  <test name="family" qual="any"><string>monospace</string></test>
  <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="strong"><string>JetBrainsMono Nerd Font</string></edit>
</match>

The combination of mode="assign" + binding="strong" is the problem. Whenever fontconfig builds a match pattern that touches the monospace fallback chain—which happens for any monospace-classified font request, even one that explicitly names a specific family like Iosevka Term—this rule fires and prepends JetBrainsMono Nerd Font to the family list ahead of the requested font. The named font then loses the sort order to the Omarchy-selected fallback, and the running app silently renders with the fallback.

This is reproducible with a one-liner—no Ghostty involved:

$ fc-match "Iosevka Term:spacing=100" family
JetBrainsMono Nerd Font

(With a fixed fontconfig, this returns Iosevka Term.)

Ghostty is uniquely sensitive to this because of how it builds its font query—see ghostty-org/ghostty#3015, where a Ghostty collaborator confirms the trigger is binding="strong" on monospace and notes 'Ghostty is the only app which has issues for this but no one knows why.' Kitty / Alacritty / WezTerm aren't affected, which is why the symptom only appears in Ghostty even though the bad rule is system-wide.

This also explains the confusing bits reported elsewhere in this thread:

• ghostty +show-config shows the right font-family because the parser is fine—Ghostty just can't load the font afterward
• Editing the config and reloading doesn't help, because the fontconfig rule is unchanged

Suggested fix in omarchy-font-set: instead of writing a <match target="pattern"> block, write an <alias> with <prefer>:

<alias>
  <family>monospace</family>
  <prefer><family>JetBrainsMono Nerd Font</family></prefer>
</alias>

The alias form only applies when an app explicitly requests monospace as a family, so it still sets the system-wide monospace default but doesn't hijack specific font requests. The script's xmlstarlet command would need to be updated to target the new XPath as well.

The fix has been verified locally—after rewriting the rule into the <alias> form and restarting Ghostty, font-family = "Iosevka Term" works correctly and fc-match "Iosevka Term:spacing=100" returns Iosevka Term.

[djneades]

@dhh Since this looks like an Omarchy-configuration problem, should this discussion be converted back into an issue? (It was originally #4811.)