ryanoasis/nerd-fonts

Nerd Fonts is a project that takes popular programming fonts and patches them to include thousands of additional icons and symbols useful to developers. The problem it solves is that many developer tools, particularly terminal prompt frameworks, file managers, status bars, and plugins like Vim's devicons, want to display icons such as file type icons, git branch symbols, programming language logos, and system status glyphs in the terminal. But standard fonts do not include these symbols, so the icons either show up as blank squares or require installing custom symbol-only fonts alongside your regular font. Nerd Fonts solves this by taking well-loved coding fonts like Hack, Cascadia Code, JetBrains Mono, Source Code Pro, Fira Code, and many others, and injecting over 10,000 icon glyphs into the unused unicode code point slots of each font. The icons come from icon collections like Font Awesome, Material Design Icons, Devicons, GitHub's Octicons, and others. The result is a single patched font that contains both the readable text characters you type and the icons your terminal tools want to display. Over 60 pre-patched font families are available for download directly. For fonts not already patched, the project provides a FontForge Python script that can patch any font you supply. Installation options include downloading release archives, using Homebrew on macOS, Chocolatey or Scoop on Windows, or Arch Linux's package repositories. The repo notes that cloning the full repository is not recommended due to the enormous size of the included font files. The tech stack is primarily CSS and Python scripting for the patcher.