some icons don't display correctly in fbterm

Question

some icons don't display correctly in fbterm

Closed this issue 3 months ago · 4 comments

Requirements

I have searched the issues for my issue and found nothing related or helpful
I have searched the FAQ for help
I have checked the Wiki for help

Experienced Behavior

when running :NvimWebDeviconsHiTest in neovim some icons like the docker ones are displayed as a box with a question mark instead of the docker icon inside of fbterm

Expected Behavior

when running :NvimWebDeviconsHiTest in neovim that all icons display properly

Example Symbols or Text

󰡨  compose.yaml                DevIconDockerfile               ctermfg=68 guifg=#458ee6
󰡨  docker-compose.yml          DevIconDockerfile               ctermfg=68 guifg=#458ee6
󰡨  docker-compose.yaml         DevIconDockerfile               ctermfg=68 guifg=#458ee6
󰡨  containerfile               DevIconDockerfile               ctermfg=68 guifg=#458ee6
󰡨  .dockerignore               DevIconDockerfile               ctermfg=68 guifg=#458ee6
󰡨  dockerfile                  DevIconDockerfile               ctermfg=68 guifg=#458ee6
󰡨  compose.yml                 DevIconDockerfile               ctermfg=68 guifg=#458ee6

Font Used

Mononoki Nerd Font Mono

Source of Font File

ttf-mononoki-nerd arch linux extra repo

Terminal Emulator (and the title of the terminal window)

fbterm

Operating System and Version

endeavour os on 6.12.6-arch1-1kernel

Screenshots

Answer 1 · 2024-12-24T09:17:03.000Z

Sorry to hear of your problems.

Lets see

󰡨  compose.yaml                DevIconDockerfile               ctermfg=68 guifg=#458ee6
󰡨  docker-compose.yml          DevIconDockerfile               ctermfg=68 guifg=#458ee6
󰡨  docker-compose.yaml         DevIconDockerfile               ctermfg=68 guifg=#458ee6
󰡨  containerfile               DevIconDockerfile               ctermfg=68 guifg=#458ee6
󰡨  .dockerignore               DevIconDockerfile               ctermfg=68 guifg=#458ee6
󰡨  dockerfile                  DevIconDockerfile               ctermfg=68 guifg=#458ee6
󰡨  compose.yml                 DevIconDockerfile               ctermfg=68 guifg=#458ee6

This is always the same icon, F0868:

And that glyph exists in the font:

I suspect this is a limit offbterm. Did you try any other terminal emulator, a simple and 'dump' one that does render the glyphs on its own, like gnome terminal or tilix? I can not find any current code repository, and maybe it (fbterm) is just too old and unmaintained? The last version here https://code.google.com/archive/p/fbterm/ is from 2010 😬

Answer 2 · 2024-12-24T20:04:40.000Z

it works in ghostty and alacritty and kitty so yeah probably specific to fbterm... fbterms most maintained handling is the aur package for arch which has a few patches

Answer 3 · 2024-12-24T20:11:14.000Z

https://salsa.debian.org/debian/fbterm
this is the upstream of the aur package
and this is the aur package link
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/fbterm

the debian package was last updated about 4 years ago
the aur package newest update is about a year ago

it is not dead software as there is just a limited amount of things to bug fix or add to this kinda stuff

Answer 4 · 2024-12-25T23:28:19.000Z

I close this as this issue is a problem that (most probably) fbterm just stores ucs-2 instead of utf-16 or the nowadays popular utf-8.
That was a popular way to handle things back then, but breaks of course with todays codepoints.

In fact the same problem still (?) hounts Windows' old cmd command window that also seems to support utf-16 but in fact uses ucs-2 instead and can not represent any codes bejond FFFF.