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I'm having problems visualising Nerd Fonts on the Ubuntu Gnome terminal. I can correctly configure the fonts in the terminal, but it doesn't show aggregate fonts, only icons.

As an example, this is a screenshot using NeoVim:

enter image description here

As shown in the image, the file icons are visualised correctly in the tree on the right side of the screen, but the pipe |> is not merged into one single character.

The characters are correctly merged in the Windows Terminal using Ubuntu 22.04 with WSL2:

enter image description here

I'm running the following configuration on a virtual machine running on Windows:

  • OS: Ubuntu Desktop 22.04
  • Terminal: Gnome Terminal
  • Font selected: JetBrains Mono Nerd Font Regular

I can edit the question with more information if needed.

1 Answer 1

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The term for "problems visualizing" in this case is "Ligature Support".

Here's a screenshot of my typing echo |> into two terminals

The top terminal is kitty, which does have ligature support, and the bottom terminal is gnome-terminal which does not have ligature support.

There's already an issue for vte, the library that handles the terminal backend for gnome-terminal, to handle ligatures. It's not complete at this time.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/192

The FiraCode page has a list of terminals that do support ligatures, and "Windows Terminal" is one that works.

https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode#terminal-compatibility-list

Personally, I've been using kitty for years and it works great. Using the Ligature support patch on st also looks interesting for a very minimal terminal.

https://st.suckless.org/patches/ligatures/

The size of your icons on the right side NvimTree window is very small. Please update your post with a close up of that character. To my eyes, the circled thing on the right looks the same in both images.

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  • Thanks for the answer, this is exactly what I was looking for. Just to add a note, the two icons on the right are indeed the same, I circled them in red to highlight that in both terminals the icons were appearing (so the terminals do take the font family in the configuration), but not the ligatures. Aug 22, 2022 at 12:14

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