Powerline symbols aren't working?

Question

Hi I'm trying to use a power line theme for zsh and although I've installed the Powerline-symbols.otf and various fonts from the https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline-fonts repo, I cannot get the Powerline prompt to show the symbols. Instead I get [X]'s where the symbols should be.

I'm using terminal and made sure that it is set to xterm-256 colours and utf-8 encoding.

Vanward

Answer 1

Just downloading and installing the fonts is not enough. In order to get the Powerline symbols, you need to tell Terminal to use one of the patched fonts you downloaded.

This can be done from the menu Terminal->Preferences.... In Settings->Text click on the button Change... in the section Font. Choose any font with "Powerline" in its name and you should get to see the Powerline symbols.

Dorthadorthea

Hey! Sorry for the late reply but this is indeed the answer. I feel stupid for assuming the font would "automatically" load. – Vanward

It's incredible this is not more clearly stated elsewhere. I've been struggling for 4 hours to get Konsole and VSCode to show this properly and tested everything out there. This was the issue! – Janetjaneta

is there way to edit through command line, i can't find preferences in terminal. Im using elementary OS – Cerulean

@MuhammadSaquibShaikh Although the terminal emulator is often simply named "Terminal" in the menus of the different distributions/desktop environments, there is a long list of different terminal emulators like xterm, gnome-terminal, urxvt, termite, … . How each is configured differs between the different terminal emulators. I do not know which terminal emulator is used by default in elementary OS. Running ps $PPID in a terminal session should tell you the name of the emulator. – Dorthadorthea

Output: 31026 ? Rl 0:00 io.elementary.terminal – Cerulean

@MuhammadSaquibShaikh It looks like the lack of configuration is an intentional "feature". As per the per the source documentation: "A super lightweight […] terminal. Comes with […] little to no configuration." Unless the font can be changed in some central configuration tool of elementary OS, the easiest thing to do would probably be to use some other terminal emulator (e.g. wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_applications/…) I do not know which ones elementaryOS provides out of the box or how to install them there. – Dorthadorthea

Answer 2

I just set the font dejavuSansMono NF and problem solved

Kaisership

Thank you for mentioning that font, really avoids the hassle of installing and using the powerline fonts (or any other font) – Cindy

Answer 3

I didn't have the fonts in the font list. To install them you need to clone fonts

git clone https://github.com/powerline/fonts.git

then to open PowerShell and run

.\install.ps1

inside your fonts directory. If you get error

FullyQualifiedErrorId : UnauthorizedAccess

you need to update policies by running

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

via PowerShell. After that try to install fonts again.

Now you will be able to change the font as instructed above by Adaephon

Ineslta