Nerd Font patcher on MacOS (2023-01-14)
"Nerd Fonts patches developer targeted fonts with a high number of glyphs (icons). Specifically to add a high number of extra glyphs from popular ‘iconic fonts’ such as Font Awesome, Devicons, Octicons, and others."
Nerd Fonts looks like a very nice way to get a lot of extra visuals at the command line, lots of programming related icons and shapes. They even have downloads of popular programming fonts patched with the extra icons. So if you use one of them, head to https://www.nerdfonts.com/, download their patched version and you're good to go.
However, I've recently switched to a paid programming font (Berkely Mono, it's lovely) and as you'd expect for a paid font, it's not included. Luckily, the Nerd Font folks have a patcher!
I got a bit confused about how to run it on MacOS, but once it all came together, it worked great. Here's what worked for me, as of 2023-01-14:
I'm on MacOS, and use homebrew, so:
$ brew install fontforge
Then go to https://www.nerdfonts.com/, scroll to the bottom and download FontPatcher.zip, and unzip that somehwere temporarily.
I also copied the font I wanted to patch into that same directory.
$ fontforge -script ./font-patcher --complete BerkeleyMono-Regular.otf
The script created a new (much larger) font named Berkeley Mono Regular Nerd Font Complete.otf. I copied that to /Users/USER/Library/Fonts/ (where USER is my local username) and updated my terminal program's config to use this. Done!
Now I can experiment with some of the recent command line tools which use these icons, like lsd (ls replacement), Zellij (like tmux/screen), and Starship (fancy shell prompt).