Episode: 4383
Title: HPR4383: Changing font in Arch Linux (Wayland)
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4383/hpr4383.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:02:07

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4383, for Wednesday the 21st of May 2025.
Today's show is entitled, Changing Font in Arch Linux Will and it is part of the
series bash scripting.
It is hosted by Oxo and is about 11 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, how I changed my default font for my system.
Hello and welcome to another episode for Hacker Public Radio.
My name is Oxo and today I want to record a little bit about fonts and how to install
fonts in Arch Linux in the Wayland.
For me, it was a little bit of a journey to eventually find out that it is quite easy
to install fonts, but yeah, of course, like everything, you have to know how to do it.
And that's why I make this recording for you, so yeah, you don't have to struggle yourself
so much as I did in the beginning.
First of all, for installing a new font for your terminal window and your compositor,
you have to select the font.
And I went to this website, Nerd Fonts.
It's a nice website, there are quite a lot of fonts in there, but also these icons that
they have, and if I scroll up here on the home side, you can see they have a lot of icons
that are used in different applications, I think, or glyphs, as they know it.
Yeah, it's nice to have a compatible font for all kinds of environments and situations.
So that's why I chose the Nerd Fonts variant of, let's see, JetBrains, it is a JetBrains
Mono.
So when you go to the website of Nerd Fonts, you can select Fonts Downloads on the blue
button, there's a blue button for Downloads, and then you can scroll down a little bit and
tell you hit the one that I installed, JetBrains Mono Nerd Font, and then you can click on a preview.
And then you can see a nice piece of code and how it looks in this particular font.
On the left side you see all the fonts that are available for Nerd Fonts, and then you
can select a little pin on the right end of that bar to sort the selected font on top,
and then you can easily, yeah, select different fonts and see how they differ.
So I always used this Source Code Pro, and probably I didn't use Source Code Pro, or at
least not this version, because I always had a so-called Slesht Shiro, and I decided
now I want to have a dotted zero, so that means that the zero, it has a dotted-sided circle,
instead of just a zero without anything, because that can confuse it with capital O, at least.
And I want to have a symmetrical zero, so I didn't like the Slesht anymore, and that also
was one of the triggers to change these default fonts of mine.
But JetBrains Mono has a so-called dotted zero, and yeah, it looks quite neat if I compare
it in this website that I mentioned, if I compare it to Source Code Pro, it's a little
bit higher font, and for my feeling it gives a little bit more space, and yeah, it's
more legible for me at least.
So that's how you select fonts.
Of course you can also select fonts from other sources, but this is a nice beginning,
I think.
So let's bring up my browser here, okay, and then let's see.
The next step is to download the font, and what I did is I use J for that, and I just
checked, instead of doing installation manually, which you can do after downloading it from
the third fonts, I chose to use J for that, and I entered J, that's S, and then Y, and
then it was probably something, let's see, I have to search back into my, yeah, TTF,
iPhone, JetBrains, iPhone Mono, iPhone Nerd.
That is the package I used to install JetBrains Mono Nerd fonts.
It's quite a big package, that was the downside of it, after installation, I think it's almost
200 megabytes, and that's, I actually didn't like that so much, but yeah, you have a lot
of different fonts available then, and styles also available, and yeah, I hope this
package will cover me for the coming 10 years, and I don't have to think about it anymore.
So then it's fine for me, those 200 megabytes, but yeah, I think it could be less, I don't
want to dive into it, for now I have enough disk space available, so I don't bother.
So the installation, like I said, is J, J, iPhone, S, Y, and then TTF, the iPhone, JetBrains,
iPhone Mono, iPhone Nerd, and that will install this version of Nerd fonts, the JetBrains
Mono version.
And then I struggled, because I didn't know how to update my font database, and that's
the key part of this, so I installed all kinds of fonts, but I couldn't use them because
my database was not in another update, that with the new installed fonts, and the way you
do that is typing F, C, iPhone cache, and then with the options, iPhone, iPhone 4s,
iPhone, iPhone for both, so F, C, cache, dash, dash, 4s, dash, dash for both, and what
that does, it is updating the font database, and after you have done that, you can verify
that your new installed font is available by typing F, C, list, and pipe it to, for
example, Grap, and then the font name, or part of the font name that you have newly installed.
So what I did is F, C, iPhone, list, and then a pipe symbol, and then Grap, or I used
the RigGrap, so I typed RG, and then I typed Jet, and I got a lot of lines involving
all kinds of styles within the JetBrains font, and yeah, like I said before, this is a
probably a bit overkill of how many styles and stuff is installed, but I liked the font
so much that I don't bother, and I just leave it as it is.
But anyhow, I verified that my fonts are more available, and then you can start changing
your application settings.
So what I did, as I went into my Swag configuration, for example, and then I changed the font
from Source Code Pro to JetBrains Mono Nerd font, and then I had to reload my configuration
and then I could have the C, the new font inside my bar, for example, my sway bar, which
shows on top of my screen, and immediately it felt refreshing, and I liked it very much.
I liked the numbers also, they are very legible, legible, and like I said, the dashed
Giro is very cool for me, so it gives a lot of more symmetry, and it's easier to recognize
this dotted Giro compared to the last one.
The other applications that I have altered are Alacrity, Toefe, which is the tool that
actually does my D-Menu for Wailand, and E-Mex of course, and I still have to do thin,
probably, I don't know, let's see what Fin does.
If Fin is already using this new font, let's see if I actually, yeah, my Giro is at least
a dotted Giro, so I think that Fin is picking up this new font already, yeah, it does.
So the four is also very neat, it's an open four instead of a closed four, and so yeah,
it's nice, so Fin does pick it up automatically, and yeah, probably I will run into application
that does not have picked up this new font, and then I have to change it later, but for
now the majority of applications that I use, which are Sway, Alacrity, Toefe, and E-Mex,
Fin, yeah, they are switched over to the new font, and like I said, I like it very much,
and yeah, that is the way you install fonts inside Art Linux under Wailand, it's quite
easy, and yeah, like I said, the key part is to update your font database with this FC
cache command, so thank you very much for your attention, and I hope you found this episode
interesting, and see you later in the next one, goodbye.
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