nerdfont: add new backend

[seanfarley]

This is the bare minimum to get NerdFont usable in all-the-icons. I'm
unsure if this is the right approach since NerdFont includes
Font Awesome, devicons, weather icons, octicons, material design, etc.

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[seanfarley]

I seem to remember @seagle0128 wanting NerdFonts?

[wyuenho]

This is likely not the way to do it. Firstly there's no such font called Nerdfonts, nerd fonts are patched fonts to existing open source programming fonts. Secondly, if you are going to use an all-in-one font, you should probably replace all the data files for all the fonts in this package.

[wyuenho]

Is there anyway you can incorporate nerd-fonts.el as a dependency?

[seanfarley]

This is likely not the way to do it. Firstly there's no such font called Nerdfonts, nerd fonts are patched fonts to existing open source programming fonts. Secondly, if you are going to use an all-in-one font, you should probably replace all the data files for all the fonts in this package.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I'm not sure what that would look like though.

[seanfarley]

Is there anyway you can incorporate nerd-fonts.el as a dependency?

Oh, nice; I didn't even know that existed! What would be the relationship between this package and nerd-fonts.el?

[wyuenho]

What would be the relationship between this package and nerd-fonts.el

This package will be just the front end to font data to maintain compatibility with the rest of the ecosystem.

[seanfarley]

Ok! Would we keep a different entry point for nerdfonts as I've written? For example, I have (define-icon nf all-the-icons-data/nf-icon-alist "NerdFont Icons") but I don't think that's the best approach.

Would we keep all the current interfaces as-is, but make a new function for the set of icons NerdFont provides minus the set of pre-existing ones (font awesome, weather, material, etc.)?

[seanfarley]

I guess, in general, I'm confused as to why there isn't a general all-the-icons function for "give me the set of icons that match 'search string'" where the order would be a pre-defined order of our choosing (but make it a plist so that users could filter as they want).

That's basically why I use Nerd Fonts: just give me a font with every icon enabled. Where-as this package wraps the magic of figuring out the correct font to apply to the face... which isn't needed with Nerd Fonts, correct?

Please correct me if my logic is wrong!

[wyuenho]

Would we keep a different entry point for nerdfonts as I've written?

No, you will just use the default font as that will be the requirement of the emacs user to set their default font to the patched font.

I guess, in general, I'm confused as to why there isn't a general all-the-icons function for "give me the set of icons that match 'search string'" where the order would be a pre-defined order of our choosing (but make it a plist so that users could filter as they want).

This package provides 4 different ways to look up icons - by dir, file, mode and url. Each way is unique for their intended usage. Everyone of these all-the-icons-icon-for-[dir|file|mode|url] have some minimal logic to look up the actual icon glyphs from a bunch of all-the-icons-*-icon-alist variables. Each of these all-the-icons-*-icon-alist effectively maps a package-specific global search string to a specific glyph in a supported family. The font families are the "backends" that provide the specific glyphs.

With nerd fonts, you have an excellent opportunity to remove all these other font family backends. You just need to maintain the search strings, but redo the mapping. You have a good opportunity to massively simplify the code base here.

[seanfarley]

With nerd fonts, you have an excellent opportunity to remove all these other font family backends. You just need to maintain the search strings, but redo the mapping. You have a good opportunity to massively simplify the code base here.

Aha, that's indeed what I was wondering about. Ok, that's a bit more work but I'll try to tackle it later this weekend :-)

[seagle0128]

Yep, I tried integrating nerd fonts, but it seems some icons are missing.
The similar project is nerd-icons.el. Again, many icons are missing there.

BTW, I developed icons-in-terminal.el which is able to be used in both GUI and terminal. It doesn't leverage nerdfonts, and unfortunately the upstream icons-in-terminal is not active now.

[seanfarley]

Oh no, that's bad :-( Which icons were missing, @seagle0128? Is there a way to programmatically find missing icons?

[seagle0128]

@seanfarley For example, no emacs/elisp icons 😢

I worked with @twlz0ne and identified some but many are still missing. Please refer to
https://github.com/twlz0ne/nerd-fonts.el/blob/master/nerd-fonts-data.el
ryanoasis/nerd-fonts#342

[seanfarley]

Fair enough, @seagle0128. I'll close this and follow those threads you mentioned; thanks!