Add linux console support for Nerd Font

[Qwer-TeX]

Add linux console support for Nerd Font

[Finii]

What is "the Linux console (aka CLI)"? Can you give the proper name of that terminal emulator?

Chatgpt wasn't also useful here either.

🤣 Thats a good one.

[Qwer-TeX]

@Finii It's not a terminal emulator. It's the bare bones command line interface. The one you can access using Ctrl+Alt+F(1,2,3,4,etc)

[Finii]

Ah, yes 🤦‍♀️

Yesteryear that font was predetermined by the VGA card's BIOS 😬
How is it done nowadays? I have no clue. Any pointers?

All the icons are outlines, and the main target of Nerd Fonts are outline fonts (i.e. OpenType fonts like ttf and otf).
Anyhow, one can look into that; but I would need to get some impluse where to start without loosing to much time finding basics of how to manipulate that console out. I use it only as last resort when XWin crashed or something ;-)

[Finii]

Note to self:

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Linux_console
• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/161890/how-can-i-make-a-psf-font-for-the-console-from-a-otf-one
• https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/stable/postlfs/console-fonts.html

One problem as I see it right now is that the font system is bad old codepage based, so only 256 characters. Even though unicode is used that is really limiting (I would say impossible to use for something like Nerd Fonts). We could substitude some lesser used glyphs with the powerline ones, but even powerline-extended seems like a stretch; and then the question is if this helps at all.

[Qwer-TeX]

I guess that to support nerd fonts the linux console would need a extensive rewrite in the kernel source.

[Finii]

Yes. With only 256 glyphs (codepages, I thought that stuff is so old it would not be in Linux at all, but codepages seem to hound us forever) I could only imagine to add the powerline (core) glyphs; I mean substitute some other glyphs with powerline glyphs, but ... that will break uses where these other glyphs are expected.

So I guess it is just not feasible, unfortunately.