Fonts are a mess: Troubleshooting Wiki

[chipbuster]

We've had a steady trickle of issues with emojis and powerline symbols not being visible for just about as long as I can remember. There's a pretty simple explanation for this: Unicode is a mess, and fonts aren't that much better.

While we already have an FAQ entry on this subject, it turns out that, depending on several factors, the steps there are still not sufficient to get emoji to render in a terminal. I figured that instead of cluttering up the FAQ with lots of extra instructions per-platform, it'd be better to have an outstanding thread where users can share what configurations worked for them, or any additional insight/discoveries about how fonts are selected on various systems.

If you're posting a font solution, please also post the OS/distro and version you obtained the results on!

[chipbuster]

Post your contributions below!

[chipbuster]

On pop_OS 20.04 (an Ubuntu 20.04 derivative), I had to do the following:

• Install an emoji font: I chose fonts-emojione
• Edit ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf by adding the following lines:

    <match target="pattern">
        <test qual="any" name="family"><string>monospace</string></test>
        <edit name="family" mode="append" binding="weak"><string>EmojiOne</string></edit>
    </match>
    <match target="pattern">
        <test qual="any" name="family"><string>serif</string></test>
        <edit name="family" mode="append" binding="weak"><string>EmojiOne</string></edit>
    </match>
    <match target="pattern">
        <test qual="any" name="family"><string>sans-serif</string></test>
        <edit name="family" mode="append" binding="weak"><string>EmojiOne</string></edit>
    </match>
    <match target="pattern">
        <test qual="any" name="family"><string>emoji</string></test>
        <edit name="family" mode="append" binding="weak"><string>EmojiOne</string></edit>
    </match>

replacing EmojiOne with the name of your chosen emoji font.

In case your fontconfig is empty, an example of a full fontconfig can be found at https://github.com/AndydeCleyre/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf

I did not need to reboot, re-login, or run any commands afterwards. Simply closing and reopening the terminal application (Konsole) caused emojis to display correctly.

[CBenoit]

On Archlinux (using zsh),

If you don't get the snake by sending

$ echo -e "\xf0\x9f\x90\x8d"

Install noto-fonts-emoji

For icons just install a nerd fond as specified in documentation. If using alacritty, one needs to change the family value in bold category.
For instance:

# ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml
font:
  normal:
    family: Source Code Pro

  bold:
    family: Fira Code Nerd Font # mostly for cool icons in prompt
    style: Bold

  italic:
    family: Source Code Pro
    style: Italic

  size: 12.0

  offset:
    x: 0
    y: 0

  glyph_offset:
    x: 0
    y: 0

  use_thin_strokes: true

Is enough.

[mickimnet]

That settings only works with the default Starship configuration, as all modules use the bold face.

[jmvalenciz]

Thanks. It also works for zsh, fish and bash using kitty terminal

[TornaxO7]

Hm... my green arrow still seems to be wrong. I installed the ttf-firacode-nerd and the noto-fonts-emoji packages. I'm using alacritty as well and have the following (font-)config:

font:
  normal:
      family: Fira Code Nerd Font
      # family: FiraCode
      #family: Source Code Pro Semibold
      style: Regular

  bold:
      family: Fira Code Nerd Font
      style: Bold

  italic:
      family: Fira Code Nerd Font
      style: Italic

  bold_italic:
      family: Fira Code Nerd Font
      style: Bold,Italic

  size: 12.0

How my prompt currently looks like:

Do you have an idea what I'm doing wrong?

[chipbuster]

@TornaxO7 On my system it's called "FiraCode Nerd Font" but this may change depending on how you installed the font.

[TornaxO7]

The spaces shouldn't make a difference. I tried it with FiraCodeNerdFont, FiraCodeNerd Font and both worked as well, at least I could see the style difference, when I changed the style to semibold or bold for both cases.

[vezult]

OS: Debian 10.7 (buster)
Terminal: gnome-terminal

Solution: apt install fonts-symbola or apt install fonts-noto-color-emoji

Prior to this I had nerd-fonts installed, configured gnome-terminal to use them, verified that they were configured in gnome-settings...nada. After installing the fonts-symbola package everything magically began working. I confirmed that removal of that package causes them to break. Re-installation restores them.

Note: starship works fine on another Debian machine without this package installed. No idea why, so take this FWIW.

Update: It seems that any symbolic font may work. I found that fonts-noto-color-emoji was installed on the other working Debian machine. I could break/fix that machine by removing/installing that package.

[chipbuster]

Arch Linux, many terminals (see end for exceptions):

I can make this work without needing a patched font in any application that respects freetype rendering by doing the following:

1. Install powerline-fonts, ttf-nerd-fonts-symbols, awesome-terminal-fonts, and ttf-twemoji-color
2. Edit $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontconfig/fonts.conf to add the following contents:

<fontconfig>
  <alias>
    <family>sans-serif</family>
    <prefer>
      <family>Symbols Nerd Font</family>
      <family>PowerlineSymbols</family>
      <family>Pomodoro</family>
      <family>FontAwesome</family>
      <family>Octicons</family>
      <family>Icomoon</family>
      <family>Twitter Color Emoji</family>
    </prefer>
  </alias>
  <alias>
    <family>serif</family>
    <prefer>
      <family>Symbols Nerd Font</family>
      <family>PowerlineSymbols</family>
      <family>Pomodoro</family>
      <family>FontAwesome</family>
      <family>Octicons</family>
      <family>Icomoon</family>
      <family>Twitter Color Emoji</family>
    </prefer>
  </alias>
  <alias>
    <family>monospace</family>
    <prefer>
      <family>Symbols Nerd Font</family>
      <family>PowerlineSymbols</family>
      <family>Pomodoro</family>
      <family>FontAwesome</family>
      <family>Octicons</family>
      <family>Icomoon</family>
      <family>Twitter Color Emoji</family>
    </prefer>
  </alias>
</fontconfig>

3. Edit your terminal config so that it uses monospace as a fallback font. Example: on WezTerm, set font = wezterm.font_with_fallback({"Source Code Pro", "monospace"}) in wezterm.lua

4. Run fc-cache -f -v

5. Profit:
   

The above image is taken with zero patched Nerd Fonts installed on the system.

---

Now for the bad news: this is only really going to work for applications that use the native fallback mechanism. Most VTE terminals (gnome-terminal, konsole, etc) work with this, as do WezTerm and Yakuake.

Emulators like Alacritty and Kitty that focus on speed might not respect this mechanism by default because it slows down the render process (see this for how to do it in Kitty), and IDEs like VSCode and JetBrains don't appear to use this at all, even when the monospace font is set.

---

I suspect this will work on most modern Linux systems, but the names of the packages and fonts might be slightly different.

[chipbuster]

An additional note: as we expand our catalogue of unicode characters, simply having emoji fonts may not be sufficient for displaying symbols. For example, the Julia glyph comes from Tamil and you will need to have Tamil support to see it.

As far as I know, the symbol is supported natively on MacOS and Windows--Linux users may need to install additional language fonts.