wcwidth-icons

Support fonts with double-width icons in xterm/rxvt-unicode/zsh/vim/…

If fonts with icons like Nerd Fonts are used with some terminals like rxvt-unicode then icons must have single-width (Nerd Fonts calls this "Mono" font, generated by Nerd Fonts Font Patcher with option --use-single-width-glyphs) to work correctly. This makes icons too small (about ¼ of normal size for most icons).

To fix this for most applications (like xterm/rxvt-unicode/zsh/…) which use libc function (like wcwidth(3) or wcswidth(3)) to get symbol width you can use provided library in LD_PRELOAD environment variable.

To fix some other applications (like vim) you may need to build these applications with extra patch, provided in patches/ directory.

Install

# Build libwcwidth-icons.so and copy it to /usr/lib/ by default.
sudo make install

Gentoo Linux

sudo layman -a powerman
sudo emerge wcwidth-icons

# Patch Vim
sudo mkdir -p /etc/portage/patches/app-editors/vim{,-core}/
sudo wget https://github.com/powerman/wcwidth-icons/raw/master/patches/vim/wcwidth-icons.patch \
    -O /etc/portage/patches/app-editors/vim/wcwidth-icons.patch
sudo cp /etc/portage/patches/app-editors/vim{,-core}/wcwidth-icons.patch
sudo emerge -1 vim vim-core

Usage

export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libwcwidth-icons.so

Then run urxvt/xterm/zsh/… using font with double-width icons.