STOP USING(DOING) NERD FONTS

It’s so fucking annoying that every new UI-related neovim plugin requires you to have some sort of glyphs installed

• https://github.com/nvim-tree/nvim-web-devicons
• https://www.nerdfonts.com

# Do I even have GUI?

First off, it’s not everywhere. You are doing UI for vim, and by extension, for the commandline. Do you know that your fancy symbols become ▢▢▢▢▢▢▢ in the tty, or where even unicode is a luxury?

“Just run your shell in a emulator with graphic environment!” … Do you not see the irony?

PLUS, it’s not even consistent across all machines. How your designs look depends on the default system fonts.

# Do I give a fuck?

Second, it’s not helpful.

How does having an icon for every single file type help me recognizing the filetypes faster? How does having a Tux on my status bar help me understand that I’m on a linux machine? … The list goes on!

# Can people fucking understand it?

Third and most importantly, it’s a fucking accessibility disaster.

You are imposing the GUI mindset and designing your UI around the assumption that every user can READ and UNDERSTAND your symbol encoding. The hard truth is that people DON’T!

1. no one knows every logo, so people have to learn.
2. visual impairment exists! Some people (like myself) have trouble even reading large font ascii, not to mention your fancy nerd symbols!
3. dyslexia¹ exists! Not everyone is comfortable with encodings.

# UPDATE: For the nerdfont makers, do you know what “written language” means?

Do you think it’s cool to replace an Egyptian Hieroglyph with your own design because “your version looks more birdy than a hieroglyphic bird?”.

check this one, for example

I’ll leave the question open why the fuck do you need a bird as a file icon?

The more important question is:
Do you consider their (extinct) language your canvas?

And let me make it absolutely clear, you are not making a written language more aesthetic or accessible as most fonts do. You are not even making a font, you are appropriating a language by making a totally different glyph for your own ill-minded hacker stupidity.

Please learn how UNICODE works and respect what there already are. If you believe having glyphs for some “hacker concepts” matters, then contribute to a RFC.

# hot take

TUI makers, I do admire your work, but if your TUI program can’t opt out dependencies of arbitrary nerd fonts, you suck.

more hot take: this trend is soydevs moving from vscode to vim.