Every once in a while I come accross a situation where I need to “patch” fonts on a my system. This is usually after a fresh linux install or major kernel updates. You will know something is off with your fonts if strange hieroglyphics start appearing in terminal applications like neovim, fzf, or htop.

The canonincal web source for system fonts is Nerd Fonts. Fonts from this source provide complete symbol sets needed by modern terminal applications. I usually go with the classic Droid Sans Mono, but there are fonts for pretty much any visual preference. You can preview fonts before downloading to see how they look with different languages and themes.

Fonts on Ubuntu based systems live in .local/share/fonts. After selecting a font it needs to be downloaded and upzipped into this directory. Once the font is dropped into /fonts/ the font cache needs to be updated by running fc-cache -fv. A short bash snippet below describes the full operation:

cd ~/.local/share/fonts
wget https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/releases/download/v3.3.0/DroidSansMono.zip
unzip DroidSansMono.zip
rm DroidSansMono.zip
fc-cache -fv

After completing this operation simply update the font settings in your terminal emulator to use the patched fonts. Mission complete.