Re: xterm vs gnome-terminal and all-the-icons.el

[Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 25, 2018 at 3:11 PM, Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com> wrote:

>> I am not familiar with all-the-icons, but if
>> it involves a custom font, it will require
>> a terminal emulator that supports font
>> fallback. Xterm does not.
>
> Shame on you if you don't know what
> "font fallback" is:
>
>    A fallback font is a reserve typeface
>    containing symbols for as many Unicode
>    characters as possible.

I do not understand your comment. I made a conjecture about how
all-the-icons works (namely, that it expects characters to be
displayed using certain fonts; I now know this to be true). From that
conjecture, I drew the implication that it requires that the rendering
engine support font fallback, in other words, it must be able to try
several fonts in case the default one does not have a glyph for the
character being displayed. Further, I noted that xterm does not
support this mechanism, implying that all-the-icons cannot work under
xterm.

In reply, you are implying that my use of the expression “font
fallback” is wrong, and you are citing the Wikipedia article about
“fallback font” (which is a related but distinct concept; a fallback
font is a font that can be used for font fallback with some effect).

You should try not being so quick to shame people. Somebody might get offended.