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Comment by crtasm | Hacker News Reader

Looks interesting, why does it require a special font?

Suggest you remove the examples of downloading copyrighted content and the yify website from your readme.

The font isn't strictly required – Mabel functions just fine without it, you will just have one or two characters that don't render properly.

I suppose we could make Nerd Fonts opt-in via the config, but I don't think it's that unusual an ask. See: https://starship.rs

The images in the README have been updated.

For what it's worth, I mostly avoid using software that mandates or doesn't work as expected without nerd fonts. I find nerd fonts unnecessary but maybe it's just me.

Then it isn't a prerequisite.

The custom font adds a number of glyphs which wouldn't otherwise be accessible. Specifically for the folder icon [1] and I'd have thought for the borders as well.

Nerd Font is pretty cool, I'd give it a go - I don't know how terminals gracefully fallback if the glyphs don't exist.

1: https://github.com/smmr-software/mabel/blob/main/desert.png

If memory serves this was one of the things that bit youtube-dl in the ass with github: the documentation described/demonstrated using it to violate copyright.

Not in their documentation. Two or three of the many videos used in their unit tests were music videos, and wouldn't have been used if youtube didn't serve them differently.

It looks like there's a few glyphs being used in this application (things like folder icons, etc) that normal fonts aren't going to provide.

Ah - I'm not asking what it's for, I'm asking why isn't it optional. First time I've seen TUI software require installing a font.

Yes that's a fair call. I don't really have an opinion in the matter as I am not interested in using this tool, but your question is a fair one.

it's not technically required to function properly, just listed as a prerequisite since several glyphs require a nerd font :) you can go ahead and think of it as optional if you'd like.

what, your terminal doesn't have Unicode support?

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