Nerd-Fonts – Patched Fonts for Vim | Hacker News Reader

Nerd-Fonts – Patched Fonts for Vim

github.com

118 pointsjondot23 comments

It appears to be several popular programming fonts with a bunch of extra glyphs added. Does Vim require special font support, because I'm having a hard time figuring out the point of this.

Is this for people who like to put icons into code comments?

Buried at the bottom of the README is the Rationale:

> Originally created for use with vim-devicons vim plugin to add glyphs (icons) as labels for files based on the filetype extension or entire path

Thanks, has been refactored to make things more clear from the top

Powerline/Airline is one big one -- the status line in Vim is just a character-mode thing, but with a few extra glyphs (for line number, git branch, and arrows/wedges, most notably) it looks a lot better than if it's using a more limited character set.

vim-devicons is the other big one that this is supporting, which gives you filetype icons.

Are these things huge big deals? No. Are they nice things that make Vim's UI look a little cleaner and more informative within the confines of a pure character-mode application? Yes.

No, there's plenty of reasons why you'd want more characters available. I use emoji for git diffs in my vim line number column, for showing battery status, audio levels, etc in tmux, and so on.

> Does Vim require special font support

Not really, that's the terminal emulator's job. If you want to use unicode fuckery for pointless hipster icons, you just need to have the glyphs in any installed font, and the terminal should substitute it when needed, no matter what your configured default font is (unless said font also provides the glyphs).

I get it, you don't like the pointless icons. Some do. Often when having a homogeneous naming structure with long filenames in NerdTree, it's nice to be able to say, "Oh this is the CSS file" without having to hit a capital A to expand the "drawer" to see what type of file it is. For the record... I don't own skinny jeans, and I'm probably far too old to be a hipster.

I don't agree with you, but upvoted for not owning skinny jeans.

No Misc-Fixed in the list? That's what first comes to mind when I think of a "nerd font":

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html

A reminder to those writing open source READMEs: People coming to your project have probably never heard of it before. Tell us what this is and why, don't bury the lede.

Good point, while in my mind I thought I did do that I have now fixed/improved it to make it more obvious.

Thanks!

I confess I do run vim-airline and tmuxline so I am not entirely innocent when it comes to adding custom fonts to machines for my terminal. It makes them look a little bit nicer, doesn't cost much effort or screen space and doesn't degrade too badly.

For my eyes, vim-devicons looks like a crazy amount of icons for any console app. Can't say I am a fan but as always it is great to see diversity and tool makers making tools for every need.

I think we all look at this and think that it has crossed some line. But I also have to admit that I find myself lusting for one glyph or another, so I can't say where to draw it.

All of which means: amazing job.

What advantage does this solution have over having a custom font configuration on Linux with fallback support for a font with unique unicode glyph support? In my case, I have Google's Noto font as my main font and have Font Awesome and Emoji One as my fallback fonts and it seems to cover everything.

What exactly do these patched fonts do or add?

I totally agree that fallback is the way to go. Unfortunately I couldn't get powerline glyphs to work on my archlinux box, lost patience and just grabbed the droid patched fonts. I would say that it adds portability, consistency and makes it easier to have glyphs working straight.

they work in more places

e.g. other operating systems

I'm genuinely curious, do you have any idea how other OSs handle fonts? Does OSX have something similar to Linux's X11's font configuration? What about Windows?

if I'm not mistaken, windows can handle fallback fonts, but it requires a fair bit of manual working to do

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd3...

so in most cases, it is unsupported, and in situations where it is supported, it is usually not exposed as an option

Awesome,it is a hard work

Getting a real brogrammer vibe from this

Says ps4fanboy?

Perhaps the statement was meant as a positive exclamation?

Why?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com