Feature Request: Fontpatcher and terminal

[bassu]

Most people use emacs in terminal. It would be nice if fontpatcher can be used to display the powerline symbols kinda like what vim-powerline does.

👍
https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-powerline/tree/develop/fontpatcher

[milkypostman]

this would be awesome. maybe someone has time to do this?

[dexafree]

@milkypostman
I know this issue has been open for a while, but after some research I have seen a user who managed to solve it.

https://github.com/unic0rn/powerline

Do you think that it could be possible to add his work to yours and create an updated powerline with patched fonts support?

[milkypostman]

@unic0rn do you just want to be the official powerline repo now? i am not taking time to really work on it and rarely accept PRs.

[unic0rn]

to be honest i'm rarely coding anything in emacs lisp, unless i need something, like in this case (read as: i wouldn't consider myself a good emacs lisp programmer). it's working, it's fine for me, and as far as i can see, people are already forking it and tuning it to their liking.

my point is, everyone has their own preferences so 'official' will never mean 'best' for everyone. i'm open to pull requests, i'm just afraid that if something breaks it for me, i won't merge it - and i'm using it exclusively under mintty, so that's rather unusual i guess.

feel free to point people to my repo though, as a 'terminal version/more maintained version/whatever'. i'll check out your repo (and other forks i guess) and try to merge back as much as i can in next days.

[milkypostman]

hrm, ok. well, can you make a PR against my repo and i'll check out the changes then maybe merge them?

[unic0rn]

done.

btw, it's a broader topic when it comes to using emacs under the terminal. at least under mintty with cygwin and screen, some emacs.el tweaks were needed for key-combo handling. on the other hand, nothing looks like emacs under screen, with both having powerline theme. heck, i even have powerline-themed prompt for zsh (not visible on these screenshots).

i should perhaps gather all related changes and publish them as a separate emacs-powerline-related repo, when i'll have some time.

[unic0rn]

@milkypostman i know that in another PR you were against such solution, favoring 'generic' utf-8 chars as alternatives to GUI icons, but that won't fly, imho. the whole point is to have it behave like the vim version, and that one uses patched fonts, and you just can't replace chars like the line number one, or vcs. so i guess this solution is the only reasonable one when it comes to terminal support for powerline.

[milkypostman]

In general I am opposed to the solution just because I don't like the idea of patching a font, but I understand the desire and since I am not active enough with the project to develop something else I am willing to accept this. You seem to have thought about it and it is road tested 👍

should merge in a couple days.

[unic0rn]

well, that's what vim version does. i know it's far from perfect, but the repo linked in the readme has a pretty nice selection of fonts already patched, so it's not that bad. it's not my idea either, i just came across that other PR some time ago, then found the patched fonts, and figured out it should be done properly.

i guess until all terminals will adopt some universal on-the-fly font patching solution (unlikely), it's the only way we can get that close to the look of original powerline. the devil is in the details, like the repo icon or line number icon - small things that make it stand out. that being said, does the emacs powerline support those in GUI mode? because if not, perhaps someone would be willing to make a patch for those. i'm using terminal-only emacs build, so i guess it won't be me.

as for road tested, well, it works and didn't cause any problems in the past months. few others have forked it to tweak it, so i guess it works for them as well. but if by 'thought about it' you meant 'you like blabling a lot' then i agree ;) the truth is, i just wanted emacs powerline under terminal, and i wanted it to be pretty, so perhaps it's just a quick hack, but who cares, as long as it works.

[nipunarora]

is this request closed?

[milkypostman]

it's not closed it's still open and it's been 4 years so probably need someone to revisit this again.