Font Management On Linux

Many new-to-Linux users have questions about installing fonts and previewing fonts on Linux. While there are some nice GUI applications that help with these tasks, you don't actually need to install any extra programs to manage your fonts. Everything you need is already installed on your system.
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[@bahathir_]

$fc-list | cut -d : -f1 $fc-list | awk -F : '{print $1}' $fc-list | sed 's/:.*//'

[@DistroTube]

And while we are playing this game: fc-list -f "%{file} " Of course, I wanted to use both awk and sed in this video to expose potential new users to those tools.

[@lorenzocabrini]

@@LoweryAustin Yes, but the benefit of pipes is that application developers don't need to duplicate functionality that is already provided by other tools. It keeps the tools smaller and the developer can focus their attention on what the tools needs to do. I almost always prefer to use pipes.

[@bahathir_]

Great. Understood. I also started with very basic shell scripting. Just use the tools as basic as possible. It is a good way to understad the basic functions of each tools.. Time to time I look deeper into each tool's features. Acctualy we can use perl, python, .. to get similar results.. :) My advice is learn and not afraid to make mistakes.. If not sure, just build a VM to play GNU Linux . Keep the good good work to spread the knowledge.. Thank you.

[@chigozie123]

Even simpler $fc-list : file DT seems to be having too much fun with command line EDIT: This is not a shell trick. The ":" is part of the command that fc-list understands. This is just saying _show us just the file name_ EDIT2: To remove the colon near the end, use $fc-list --format='%{file} '

[@bahathir_]

@@LoweryAustin The purpos of dt's script is to extracts filepath from the fc-list, and to display each font how it's looks like. Yes, "man" is your man. :)

[@TangoIndiaMike144]

Give this man a medal for not dismissing the "basic questions". Been a long time linux user and pretty new to your channel DT, but I just want to say thank you for producing such high quality linux content.

[@kylebriffa7]

People use "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" because it contains all the letters of the English alphabet

[@edupazz]

No, the actual version is "the lazy brown dog jumped a fox once" hahaha

[@DavidLindes]

@@edupazz you got an s in there? Or a q? Or..... yeah, no. Kylebriffa7 had it right. Though there are others. The above is just one example of something called a Pangram. There are others. When I took an ASL class, and was learning finger spelling, we actually had the assignment of coming up with one, to demonstrate our learning of the full alphabet. More info on the Wikipedia page for Pangram.

[@edupazz]

@@DavidLindes have you watched the video?

[@DavidLindes]

@@edupazz yes, and on a rewatch, I noticed that you were quoting directly rather than making up some other bogus version. I didn’t bother to change the comment, though, because the core of it, to my mind, namely the informational aspects of why these things are relevant and what they’re called, remained valid. Sorry for missing your humor, though.

[@edupazz]

@@DavidLindes okay, peace ✌️

[@Gomotianu]

I was right, wasn't i? DT is getting more and more noob friendly.

[@DistroTube]

Or maybe YOU are becoming more "leet"? :D

[@Gomotianu]

@@DistroTube "I don't even knoe what that means but i totally agree!" This has been my fantastic experience running linux so far and it fits here perfectly :D

[@jamegumb7298]

@farEvil Dee You mean 1337.

[@thingsiplay]

DT gets impressed by the neat little GUI app. DT: You actually don't need all these nonsense stuff.

[@sophosvanalles6265]

You should compile a bunch of these basic out of the box scripts for new users as "intro packs". New users have now idea how to use Linux without reliance on 3rd party apps (I'm pretty new myself) and would really benefit from a pack of nice clean scripts.

[@n4p3r0]

Oh, this is useful for me, thanks!

[@aehjr1]

Nicely done, thanks. You just reminded me one more thing to do on my new PC...install additional fonts.

[@DirkDittmar]

Great lesson of what you can do out of the box without fancy GUI apps! Just look what is in your box and learn the magic of the terminal!

[@MyReviews_karkan]

All I've ever done is search the font I wanted on the web, download a ttf/otf file and double click it, a window pops up that has an image of how it looks like and a "install" and "cancel" on the title bar, hit "install" if I liked it or "cancel" if I didn't. After that I'd go and change to it from the settings. Never knew about "font managers" nor the terminal. Honestly. Lol Edit: just realized that I've been watching your videos for a while without subbing. Haha You've got a new sub, sir.

[@rawjam8542]

Thanks DT, Interesting stuff as always! I've been a Nubie for the past 10 yrs, Haven't needed to do anything with fonts, Maybe i just want an OS that works! However there's a lot of folk that seems to know better, Is there some sort of intellectual competition going on , With some jobs worth! Anyhow I like your content, I'm learning from it!

[@damiencalloway]

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy (yellow) dog. I learned this with the word yellow, but you can actually leave that out and still get a sentence where each letter appears at least once

[@AndersJackson]

No Å, Ä and Ö änywhär whåt I see ovör there. :-)

[@bobgrimes8618]

I have always installed ms core fonts ever since I got into Linux in 2008.

[@DannyMexen9]

Yes, this is good thing to do especially if you work at an office where the primary office suite is Office

[@gimcrack555]

@@DannyMexen9 That's the main reason for me. Having the ms-core-fonts, helps keeping things looking the same while sharing office documents and vice-versa

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

I don’t think Microsoft uses those fonts any more.

[@anandrajaram21]

Are you kidding me dt? I had just installed arch linux from scratch, and wanted to change my font to a better one, but I couldn't, so I decided to live with my bad font. And holy goddamn moly, I see you upload a linux font management video. Did you just read my mind?

[@DannyMexen9]

On a clean install, I install power line patched fonts and ms core fonts.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

14:47 Alternatively, it would be handy to be able to ellipsize the long names on the left rather than the right.

[@thundreturtle]

You did explain everything but one needs a lot of preknowladge to follow the video. It is by no means noob friendly :D

[@MrSammotube]

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

[@copper4eva]

DT can you do a video on pimping out conky? I think it's actually a fantastic system monitor with a lot of potential, but there just isn't a lot of videos on it. Nor do you see it often on unixporn.

[@anshul493]

the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

[@davidepierrat9072]

Have not even watched the video yet, but thank you so much I needed this soo much

[@thenextpoetician6328]

Hey DT, how about a look at Wmderland and Frankenwm? Next to no one is looking at these. A couple of us using Arco have taken a look or two. Wnderland is pretty cool and I have no clue what's the issue with Franky. lol Also, you chose hard to read colors for your terminal. :)

[@Academic_nomad]

Do one Video on Linux eco-systems, some-day. I would love to have an open-source eco-system,

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

7:38 This is where the fc-match command can come in useful, e.g. fc-match space file family looks for the font which best matches a name like “space”, and lists its full filename and its actual family name.

[@gunnerjoe53]

Hello, Thinking maybe a different color scheme for terminal when you’re on camera, really hard to read that powder blue. Not bad when zoomed.

[@herrbanane]

Awesome content. I'm currently struggling to get the correct UI font size in Firefox. It's just to small. I tried modifieng the xorg.conf monitor dimensions, but that didn't help. I would really like firefox to use the system font size. Is there any other way to achieve that? Thanks in advance! :)

[@RA-rf4nz]

Speaking of fonts ... is that matrix rain screen behind you done with a script or a video on a loop? I've been looking for a script or algorithm to make my own. Have not found one yet though. Thanks!

[@Orangejuice9000]

Get the 'cmatrix' package

[@fandigilidubis5184]

Actually, for this kind of task (previewing fonts), this GUI program is like 420 times better. No need to force yourself to do everything from the terminal. And if you don't want to bloat your system, there is a utility called web browser...

[@AndersJackson]

No need to force yourself to learn lots of small GUI:s when you can do it from command line. But if using small GUI:s works for you, good for you. (Yes, I also uses GUI:s like Emacs).

[@fandigilidubis5184]

@@AndersJackson You don't need to "learn" those small GUI programs. They're usually very intuitive. Terminal is good for small and uncomplicated tasks. But if you prefer to do such things as previewing fonts from cli, then I'm not gonna stop you

[@AndersJackson]

@@fandigilidubis5184 *swishhhh*

[@xynyde0]

@@AndersJackson it takes not more than 2 minutes to install font-manager, open it and install/delete/set fonts. Who will spend time writing scripts and using terminal just to view fonts?

[@AndersJackson]

@@xynyde0 you have not managed some computers I guess. If you ever managed 5 or more machines, you will understand that using GUI to install things is way inferior to do automatic installations. That is cripts, programs without GUI. And yes, two minutes is way to long doing such a simple task.

[@rayanez]

I've been using Linux on and off for years (10+), and now Manjaro is my daily driver; I've done shell scripting on AIX, some perl scripting, I've installed different distros allong the way, and I'm confortable using the terminal, but I'm a developer not a sysadmin, and I have to confess that I've used Linux as a tool and I haven't tinker a lot with it, so there are a lot of things that DT does that I've never done that make me feel like a complete noob to Linux

[@GetGood5]

thx

[@user-sw1wq8lh2w]

I think if you're going to use flags, it's helpful to know what they are. -f --force Force re-generation of apparently up-to-date cache files, overriding the timestamp check‐ ing. -v --verbose Display status information while busy.

[@aniketfuryrocks]

Hey DT can you discuss the Nvidia and Linux Kernal 5.9 issue.

[@hotshot2472010]

great video! i do have one question though.. not about fonts but about your terminal. how to you set it to show the completed command before you finish it? that's pretty cool and that would be helpful for the work i do. thanks

[@DistroTube]

I'm using the fish shell. It remembers everything you've ever done in it and it becomes almost psychic in its ability to predict what I want. :D

[@hotshot2472010]

@@DistroTube nice! Thanks for the quick reply. I'm using the zsh shell right now but seeing that makes me want to switch to fish

[@chigozie123]

Try zsh-autosuggestions. No need to switch shells (yet) for this feature.

[@alexberenson5080]

Hey DT, I just wanna know what application do you use as your terminal welcome screen which givens you different colorful objects everytime you open termial? like sometimes its pacman sometimes its just bars of colors and all.

[@jomaweb881]

I need it too

[@alexberenson5080]

@@jomaweb881 actually they are his shell color scripts. here is his gitlab link gitlab.com/dwt1/shell-color-scripts

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Let me offer some of my own utilities: Creating a full font chart of any font, showing the Unicode coverage and any unmapped glyphs: github.com/ldo/python_freetype_examples/blob/master/font_chart . For really large fonts, trying outputting the chart as multipage PDF or PostScript files rather than PNG. Generating samples of any number of fonts using the traditional “lorem ipsum” text: github.com/ldo/qahirah_examples/blob/master/bulk_font_sample . You can also pass it .zip files (e.g. downloaded from the usual font sites), and it will generate samples of any included font files. Try going through hundreds or thousands of fonts with a GUI, and you will soon appreciate the value of command-line utilities... Collecting information on OpenType font features into an SQLite database, that you can query to see which fonts you have that support which features: github.com/ldo/python_fontconfig_examples/blob/master/collect_opentype_fonts . Oh, and for a bonus, here www.deviantart.com/default-cube/art/Region-Flags-861126407 is a display of all the national/regional flag symbols in the Noto Color Emoji font.

[@Maldito011316]

What about bitmap fonts? Or fonts for the tty? How do those even work?

[@yjk_ch]

I personally use .fonts directory on my home. It seems to work well, and I am the only user of my computer. So not having font system-wide doesn’t really matter. I think I also ran fc-cache -v without sudo. This will probably update cache only for the current user, but it’s OK to me.

[@chigozie123]

Yup when he said to use sudo I was a bit puzzled because I've never had to do that. Always just ran fc-cache and everything worked out fine

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

~/.fonts is deprecated. I think the recommended per-user location is ~/.local/share/fonts. Help reduce dotfile clutter!

[@yjk_ch]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Thanks! I didn’t know that.

[@killaken2000]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 I prefer dot clutter for things that _I_ want. I'm opposed when it's added by some program without my permission

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

@@killaken2000 fontfonfig is moving away from that, though.

[@kylestubblefield3404]

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

[@maxarendorff6521]

Interesting. `display` unfortunately doesn't work with '.otb' type fonts though.

[@trupusss]

Hi DT, thanks for the video! I found that your script can't pipe fonts that have spaces in their names. AWK just cuts the column on the first space encountered. I have no experience with sed or awk. If someone has a quick fix, that would be nice. EDIT: quick fix: awk -F: '{print $1}' instead of awk and sed

[@atharvakokate6388]

can you do a video on configuring i3blocks like the way you have?

[@NoBody-pf2nv]

1:18 The editor had too much coffee.

[@chigozie123]

Just download font manager. Everything you've shown in this video can be done with font manager. I'm not sure why it wasn't working for you. I'm also on arcolinux and I have fontmanager installed. Also the .xz extension is just the package format from github releases. The PKGBUILD script will produce the correct format required by pacman

[@micaelviana]

Your solution is more friendly, I don't understand why every Linux tutorial needs to be done in Terminal

[@xynyde0]

@Terminalforlife (LL) what's so complicated about the font-manager?

[@HenriqueNewsted]

DT your colorscheme is lacking some contrast on the blue colors, it is very hard to read the commands showing in blue when you are on terminal. Don't take this a critic, please, i am just saying cause probably some other people are struggling to read them, too.

[@caerphoto]

What if I wanted a visual preview of all the fonts, in list form, so I could quickly scan through them to find the one that looks how I want?

[@NinjAaaron87]

Looking for this exact thing, did you ever find an app?

[@ScottSteely]

Speaking of fonts, I got your DWM packages from the AUR and I can't change dmenu's font size even tho I've changed the config.def.h and recompiled. Any help brother?

[@DistroTube]

Make sure you delete the config.h file (so you only have the config.def.h file) before recompiling.

[@ScottSteely]

@@DistroTube thanks, that did the trick!

[@AtomToast]

Can you also do a video about fontconfig? I absolutely hate it and always break it

[@BenitoF2009]

Hey DT! Is there a way to print a list of samples of all fonts on the system in one pdf file and every fonts name is displayed in the corresponding font. For MS Word there was a macro that can do exactly that. Is the a alternativ way to do that on linux in terminal or libreoffice?

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

The font name is one of the least useful things to use to give a sample of the font.

[@BenitoF2009]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 That ist true. But for me enough for a quick overview. Certainly a version with additional sample text would be good, if not better.

[@alt2458]

For the script you could have used the font names for the list, given that you had it available. Still a graphical program would make more sense as in this script you made you can't preview in real time and you have to go one by one. That's not user friendly on cases where you are looking for an specific font.

[@1958indyfan]

I am new to linux and I am wondering if you could recommend a youtube channel where I could view tutorials where they explain WHY something is done instead of rushing through command lines?

[@ridhowijaya7959]

Hey DT, is posible to have multiple .vimrc file ? because is feel suck when have hundred configuration line mixed in one file example i have vim script name "ridhorc" and i want that file link to .vimrc

[@tibish]

I would not recommend fontmatrix ... it is a large program and is still buggy on the latest stable version. Not to mention it takes 6+ minutes to install on a i9 9900K with 64 GB RAM and a high-end nVME. Better stick with the command line tools at your disposal. All-n all, great video @DT

[@buttonsplaymusic4896]

Which fonts can you NOT delete from usr/share/fonts ? I have a lot, and they bloat my fonts lists (in programs like LibreOffice, image editers, etc. I want to remove those I don't want, but I don't want all text on my OS to turn into square boxes. Can you like delete all of them except one or a few, so that you can keep seeing the text on the GUI?

[@bjornotto98]

I dont have the display command availiable and pacman cant find it, whats the name of that package? Its hard to google because so many searches include the word display..

[@siddharthchhetry4218]

Hey dt please make a video on how to configure bar in wm

[@jimwinchester339]

What's 'dmenu'? I can see how it works, and so I can probably write a shellscript workalike, but I've got a brand-new Debian 12 install here. What distro are you running? Or what religion did I fail to join? If you're going to do a video filled with lines like "just basic stuff here..." - - that's one of them.

[@killaken2000]

I have always use $HOME/.fonts and find that to be the easiest way for me

[@McDuffington]

So what is the difference between using this script, versus using a different 3rd party tool? Looks to me like those "3rd party" get the job done quicker, easier and prettier. Not that I disagree; I also don't like it when people use additional software for something that's already built-in.

[@xade8381]

A video on btrfs

[@furiousfellow1583]

legit i'll be using this to install comic sans

[@StanislavVlasic]

In fc-list command, why use sed when you can do all with just awk? fc-list |awk -F ":" '{print $1}' works just fine

[@AndersJackson]

There are plenty of ways to do this, which I guess you already seen. The purpose was to demonstrate how pipe works.

[@PatrikTrefil]

Your script does not work properly (at least on my system). If there are any fonts that have spaces in the file name, it won't work (e.g. Ubuntu Mono Nerd font). I have modified the solution to this: fc-list | grep -oP "^.*?(?=:)" (start from the beginning of the line, go up to the first column and don't include the column)

[@DavidLindes]

Another, arguably better solution, is to replace the awk and sed combo with: cut -d: -f1 This gives “field 1” of what’s assumed to basically be a spreadsheet with the delimiter of a colon. Awk’s $1 is doing the same sort of thing, but with a whitespace delimiter. Using awk’s IFS variable and setting that to : would also work (and also not need sed).

[@hhtt37]

Maybe "/usr/local/share/fonts" is a better place for system wide manual installed fonts There is a lot of fonts available in standard distro: apt search font; apt search ttf dnf search --all font ttf But, How to search in Arch? pacman -Ss 'fonts|ttf'; yay -Ss ???

[@chigozie123]

This video is missing the most important aspect of font management and that is actually being able to use those fonts i.e. font configuration. Using fc-list/fc-cache to manage your font files is cool, but if your system still looks like sh*t after that, you've not really helped yourself. The freedesktop fontconfig library has more to offer than just looking at fonts. DT please make another video which references this one, but this time show people how to actually change certain aspects about their system's fonts i.e. doing actual font configuration, and creating an actual /etc/fonts/fonts.conf or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontconfig/fonts.conf file. This is the one I based mine off of for reference: gitlab.com/smac89/dotfiles/-/raw/991e6b6dbfa19d7524b4ad4b663f2d2ad5744a01/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf if anyone is interested, checkout: www.freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/fontconfig-user.html They have an example fontconfig file near the bottom of the page.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

You can have your own personal custom font config file without having to modify /etc/fonts/fonts.conf.

[@chigozie123]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 indeed that's why I mentioned xdg_config_home

[@zaccstacc4568]

anyone know how to get emojis to show on arch? They all show up as squares in my browser and terminal (urxvt)

[@AndersJackson]

You need to install a Unicode font that have those in them.

[@codestalk9183]

linux life is the sum of grep, sed, awk, cut, ls...

[@PaulNaama]

I always copy windows fonts to /usr/share/fonts then run fc-cache -fv because I need Arabic fonts too. And Ubuntu Arabic fonts are crap in Firefox.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Better to put them in /usr/local/share/fonts.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

You know what they say: a word to the wise is sufficient.

[@nekoill]

You must be reading my mind!

[@tinygriffy]

... i like gucharmap ;)

[@lorenzocabrini]

Fonts, my favorite topic. NOT! I finally managed to get readable Japanese fonts in Emacs only to upgrade Emacs and be back to unreadable fonts again. I'll fix it the day it bothers me enough. I gave up on org-drill and went back to Anki, so currently it's not a pressing issue for me. I preferred font handling on the Commodore 64. It never gave me problems.

[@w_shakes_]

This not related to this video at all...but I can't find the answer elsewhere, I'm using dwm and I want to increase my cursor size lxappearance doesn't have the setting. Anyone know?

[@w_shakes_]

Thx I haven't see a xcursor line in my xresources file or I may be blind. The xresources file is in the home dir that one right. I'm using an arch based distro all the dconf stuff I saw on the Internet in relation to Ubuntu won't work for me I don't have the same options in dconf editor

[@w_shakes_]

OK I'll try that

[@w_shakes_]

Thx very much it worked I had to reboot for it to take effect, but it worked

[@moai834]

You could have just set separator in awk instead of using sed tho.

[@urugulu1656]

even easier: display `fc-list | cut -d: -f1`

[@DistroTube]

True but I purposely wanted to show both awk and sed.

[@metastag]

Am I the only one who opens libreoffice just to preview the fonts 👀

[@tibebeselasiemehari7503]

What distro (and wm) is this? Garuda?

[@supremedeity9003]

He uses ArcoLinux with Xmonad

[@tibebeselasiemehari7503]

@@supremedeity9003 thanks

[@Lyunpaw]

Hey new to linux users, let me show you how to write scripts just to see your fonts; cause that'll bring'em to the table.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Try going through hundreds or thousands of fonts with a GUI, and you soon learn to appreciate the value of command-line utilities ...

[@abarocio80]

display $(locate "$(fc-list | awk -F':' '{print $1}' | sed -e 's/^\/.*\///' | dmenu -l 20 -p "Font Viewer")" | head -n 1) This will do the trick with shorter names.

[@micaelviana]

If you are a newbie reading this, just install a GUI program

[@wolfwolf3304]

First

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

4:48 Don’t put your own fonts in /usr/share/fonts. Put them in /usr/local/share/fonts.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

@Learn Linux Because /usr/share is for stuff installed by your distro package manager.

[@AlucardNoir]

10:54 Don't apologize, just use a GUI fond manager.

[@bahathir_]

$ xfontsel

[@youp1tralala]

Fonts are bloat. The only one you need is Terminus.

[@sumnerd69]

"OMG!Ubuntu!" is the most soyboy thing I've heard in a long time

[@CoolGuyAtlas]

Yeah it's really gay. But I guess that's the crowd who'd be excited over 'only a little spyware' Ubuntu.

[@bafi29]

That site is older than you think.

[@johnnycochicken]

It's a bit of a silly name but I've loved that site for many years

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Is “gay” a bad thing?

[@walterhwhite1392]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 no, just gay.