This is a tutorial on how to change the terminal's default fallback fonts(s) on variant systems. It was inspired by the gabrielelana/awesome-terminal-fonts project.
When displaying a character, the terminal first tries to find its glyph in current font, and if no glyph is found, it then tries to look up the glyph from a list of fallback fonts. This process is called the "font fallback mechanism".
Through the use of fallback fonts, it's possible to provide different typefaces for variant character collections.
A typical example is: setting "Monaco" as the default font, and "PingFangSC-Regular" as the fallback font for Simplified Chinese characters. In this setup, latin characters can be rendered with the nice looking "Monaco" typeface, while Simplified Chinese characters will be rendered with the "PingFangSC-Regular" font, which is optimized for CJK characters.
In the example above, if "PingFangSC-Regular" was configured to be the default font, latin characters will look odd, because they are rendered by the "PingFangSC-Regular" font instead.
This project has been moved to GitLab