alacritty: Inconsistent fonconfig fallback

Unlike gnome-terminal, alacritty does not seem to be properly loading the powerline fallback fonts. These are e.g. Provided by the powerline-fonts package.

This is on Fedora Linux.

I’m not sure what else to supply to help debug this, since I’m not quite familiar with how fontconfig does stuff.

It appears to be working in any libvte based terminal, but not in urxvt or alacritty

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 6 years ago
Reactions: 2
Comments: 15 (6 by maintainers)

Commits related to this issue

add Font Awesome as fallback font in fontconfig even if it doesn't seem to be working correctly for now in Alacritty see https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/1560 — committed to tardypad/dotfiles by tardypad 5 years ago
Make fontconfig fallback to use fallback lists computed from font_sort Fixes #3134. Fixes #2657. Fixes #1560. Fixes #965. Fixes Linux/BSD parts of #511. — committed to kchibisov/alacritty by kchibisov 4 years ago
Make fontconfig fallback to use fallback lists computed from font_sort Fixes #3134. Fixes #2657. Fixes #1560. Fixes #965. Fixes Linux/BSD parts of #511. — committed to kchibisov/alacritty by kchibisov 4 years ago
Rework Fontconfig fallback to use cached list from font_sort Previous implementation was querying Fontconfig using `charset` in a pattern, which was leading to unpredictable fallbacks in some cases,... — committed to roychoo/alacritty by kchibisov 4 years ago
Rework Fontconfig fallback to use cached list from font_sort Previous implementation was querying Fontconfig using `charset` in a pattern, which was leading to unpredictable fallbacks in some cases,... — committed to boxofrox/alacritty by kchibisov 4 years ago

Most upvoted comments

The entire fontconfig fallback was reworked and now should match the result of `fc-match -s “FONT_NAME:pixelsize=SIZE:style=STYLE”.

kchibisov on Jan 27, 2020

Please, is there any fix or workaround? I still face to this problem - incorrect font rendering. Related issue: #2055

Screenshot from 2019-08-04 21-14-24

Ubuntu (bionic) 18.04.2 LTS
Alacritty 0.3.3
Zsh 5.4.2
Oh-My-ZSH: commit 6d2221e697ea4a2445202b1c32283610f84585ef

europ on Aug 5, 2019

@realcr yes, check this issue → https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/2706 (https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/2706#issuecomment-523951277)

europ on Feb 6, 2021

Apologies for what will essentially be a “me too”. I’m seeing this on Manjaro: Package powerline-fonts installed, which provides these files:

/etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-powerline-symbols.conf
/etc/fonts/conf.d/10-powerline-symbols.conf
/usr/share/fonts/OTF/PowerlineSymbols.otf
/usr/share/licenses/powerline-fonts

10-powerline-symbols.conf is the fontconfig file which sets up fallback. gnome-terminal and kitty both work.

Alacritty version 0.3.2.

theothermatt on Jun 16, 2019

I believe we came to the conclusion that Alacritty either does something wrong with fontconfig fallbacks, or VTE extends the functionality of fontconfig to do something special on top of the normal fallback fontconfig provides.

My guess is the former. Kitty seems to handle the fallbacks fine, but alacritty doesn’t (at least on archlinux). And kitty isn’t VTE based. (although it’s possible it replicates something extra that VTE does).

tmccombs on Nov 15, 2018

Oh right, I was just looking through issues and forgot that we’ve looked into this before.

I believe we came to the conclusion that Alacritty either does something wrong with fontconfig fallbacks, or VTE extends the functionality of fontconfig to do something special on top of the normal fallback fontconfig provides.

I believe there are quite a few issues which are very similar to this, I’ll try to redirect them here whenever I find some.

chrisduerr on Oct 2, 2018

It was installed by my distros powerline-fonts package and it works in gnome-terminal, so yes.

It might be helpful if I post the IRC logs so we don’t have to re-debug this again.

NotAFile on Oct 2, 2018