[Bug] Icons on modeline lack sufficient padding

[judemille]

[Bug] Icons on modeline lack sufficient padding

[seagle0128]

I think it's related to Fira Code and your nerd fonts. I am using "Cascadia Code" and "Symbol Nerd Fonts". What nerd fonts are you using?

vspc is a half-width space, and is used between a group of an icon and texts.
The screenshot is below

My suggestion is:

1. Try emacs -Q with doom-modeline and your font configurations.
2. Try other fonts, including default font and nerd font.

[judemille]

I'm using Fira Code. I have :ui unicode enabled in Doom, and Symbols Nerd Font installed and enabled.

The issue occurs with Cascadia Code and JetBrains Mono, too.

[judemille]

Here is the appearance with emacs -Q:

I added MELPA, installed doom-modeline, set the font to FiraCode Nerd Font, and enabled doom-modeline-mode. The gaps between the icons and the text are still uncomfortably small.

[seagle0128]

I tested on macOS, Windows and Ubuntu, and no issues were observed. I think it may be related to your WM?

[judemille]

I'm running Arch Linux rolling, with KDE 5.27.10.

The issue exists on my laptop too, also Arch, with sway (have not checked version)

[seagle0128]

Well, I didn't test with KDE. I'm sure there is no issue with GTK, according to my tests.

[judemille]

On my laptop, I'm using the emacs-wayland package, which has PGTK enabled. I don't think this is toolkit-specific.

Out of curiosity, how does it look for you if you change all vspc occurrences to just spc?

[seagle0128]

No idea why vspc is so narrow in your env. Can you please try this?

(defsubst doom-modeline-vspc ()
  "Thin whitespace."
  (propertize " " 'face 'variable-pitch))

[judemille]

Changing that did nothing. Replacing all occurrences of doom-modeline-vspc with doom-modeline-spc does this:

I have no clue why changing what vspc is doesn't do anything, but not using it does.

[seagle0128]

Re-evaluate doom-modeline-segment.el or compile doom-modeline-core.el and restart Emacs after changing.

Are you sure the both are spc?

Try:

(defsubst doom-modeline-vspc ()
  "Thin whitespace."
  (propertize " " 'face 'variable-pitch))

[judemille]

Both are spc, yes. This is known behavior of nerd-icons -- if you put a space after an icon, it will become wider into that space, but still leaving a slight space.

[seagle0128]

Both are spc, yes. This is known behavior of nerd-icons -- if you put a space after an icon, it will become wider into that space, but still leaving a slight space.

Obviously the behavior is different in my env.

vspc=spc

vspc=1/2 spc

[judemille]

That's fascinating. The only possibly explanation I can come up with is that something about the fontconfig on Arch is different from your Ubuntu install.

[judemille]

I've just realized what's going on. It's Symbols Nerd Font vs Symbols Nerd Font Mono.

I didn't have the mono variant installed. Going to install it and see the behavior.

E: That was indeed it. Might be worth a note somewhere in the FAQ or something, to remind people that they should have the mono variant of Symbols Nerd Font installed.