How To Install Nerd Fonts on Linux | macOS

Open source communities have recently started taking over in each and corner of technology globally. Technology has greatly welcomed them since they are playing a key role in solving end user’s problems. This simply implies that, user is no-longer locked to one vendor whenever encounters a problem with open source products. Furthermore user is also given a chance to participate and contribute in the growth and development of the project.

In this guide we are going to discuss on how to install Nerd Fonts on Linux and mcOS.Nerd Fonts is an open source project with aim of creating and developing patched fonts, that is, fonts with bunch of icons patched into it. Nerd Fonts takes popular programming fonts and patches them with a large number of glyphs (icons). Glyphs are added from popular iconic fonts such as Font Awesome, Devicons, Font Logos, Material Design, Powerline Symbols, Octions, Weather Icons and many others.

Being an open source project and hosted in GitHub, this project also has Font Patcher script which allows you to create your own customized patched fonts.

Features of Nerd Fonts

Below are some of the interesting features of Nerd Fonts:

  1. Collective icons – Contains over 3600 icons combined from popular sets.
  2. Cross Platform – Nerd fonts are not platform-independent. Can be used to any operating system and even web.
  3. Font Patcher Script -Comes with font patcher that allows you to customize and come up with your own unique font. To do this, use the provided FontForge Python script.
  4. Best Developer fonts – Over 50 fonts are used by developers in adding icons in the projects.
  5. Supported in major projects.

Install Nerd Fonts On Linux.

Installation process for Nerd Fonts is not far apart differently from normal installation of any other fonts for Linux. There are various ways on how to install Nerd Font but in this case we are going to look at just a few of them.

Install Nerd Fonts on Ubuntu

The first method is to install using script. This is the best option especially if you want to automate installing or for use in scripts. This method is only applicable to Linux and macOS. First of all we will clone nerd-fonts repository and run the “http://install.sh” provided script. Run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts
cd nerd-fonts
sudo ./install.sh

NOTE: This command will install all fonts on your system which can lead to large amount of space being used and wasted. To solve this, you can install a single font specifying by the name.See illustrations below;

sudo ./install.sh <Font-Name>

Examples;

sudo ./install.sh Hack
sudo ./install.sh HeavyData

The next method is installing with ‘curl’. First, create a directory called fonts in ./local/share

sudo mkdir -p ~/.local/share/fonts

Navigate to folder then download the font.

cd ~/.local/share/fonts && curl -fLo "Droid Sans Mono for Powerline Nerd Font Complete.otf" https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/raw/master/patched-fonts/DroidSansMono/complete/Droid Sans Mono Nerd Font Complete.otf

Installing Nerd Fonts on MacOS

To install with Homebrew, run the following commands:

brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts
brew install --cask font-hack-nerd-font

Or via Curl with the below command:

cd ~/Library/Fonts && curl -fLo "Droid Sans Mono for Powerline Nerd Font Complete.otf" https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/raw/master/patched-fonts/DroidSansMono/complete/Droid Sans Mono Nerd Font Complete.otf

This has been a guide on how to install Nerd Fonts on Linux and MacOS. I trust the guide has been helpful and enjoy using Nerd Fonts.

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