Ligatures and Emoji in the Suckless Simple Terminal

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I decided to finally mess around with the Suckless Simple Terminal ST, and add the latest work from luke smith to get color emoji support in ST. I forked Luke's repo, then installed the necessary dependency libxft-bgra for the emoji's and we were off to the races.

Next I sudo make install so I had the latest build of ST from Luke with the emoji support and then I made a branch on the repo to test out the ligatures before committing to the change. Next I manually did the patch as there was a diff made for the patch but knowing how much stuff Luke put into his build of ST I didn't want to deal with the headache of dealing with merge conflicts so I just manually added the code to the repo. I also had to install a new C library called harfbuzz and add that in.

With all these items added I ran sudo make install again and tested out the feature and lo and behold.... I didn't have ligatures.... WTH... So I remembered that I was using Inconsolata for my font and I needed a font with ligature support. This turned out to be FiraCode But I didn't like the serifs on FiraCode so what I did was install JetBrainsMono-Regular as my font of choice and I couldn't be happier with the result. So to finish it off I ran sudo make install one more time, tested, aaaaaand we have ligatures. I have ligatures in Vim too because Vim is in the terminal, and now that I have the font in as well and figured out installing fonts onto Linux, I now also have ligatures in VSCode and RStudio. It was a journey, but I'm happy with this new build of ST and with my manually added in patch for ligatures I decided to have my own repo put up Here.

Ultimately I think I will end up learning C and/or C++ for writing terminal things, for faster functions in R and just the new dimension of programming, when I do I'll probably look at ST's code for learning and so it will help me learn how to modify my terminal more.

This topic was covered in This YouTube Video.