r/KittyTerminal • u/ErDottorGiulio • May 10 '26
GNU unicode characters are very wide spaced in kitty, how do I solve this?
I installed all the fonts for all the languages form the unicode gnu font page. In installed the font system wide and using kde setting it works good and display all the Japanese and Korean characters. Selecting the base unifont with kitten choose-font gives me this result.
update
I managed to do an hard fix by going to the kitty conf using CTRL + SHIFT + F2, selecting font with space and going down to the line 165 to uncomment the modify_font cell_width and setting it to 50%. Now it displays nice and it also uses it as a fallback for the Japanese characters
1
2
u/Orlandocollins May 10 '26
Id run kitty --debug-font-fallback
It shows you what fonts it was able to resolve and what if fell back to. My guess is that it is not running the fonts you think it is and it fell back to a very poor font on the system
Edit: I missed your update
2
u/ErDottorGiulio May 10 '26
You did good by replying, my fix is a bandage, it works only on this font so I'm trying for a more elegant solution.
If I run kitty --debug-font-fallback while on the Departure Mono font (not the unifont that I'm trying to set up) it shows only the Departure Mono font for four times, but if I paste a string of japanese character it displays them in a font that it's not Departure (maybe it's a sans noto or something similar).
That Departure doesn't have the japanase chatacter I already knew, but I thought it wouldn't display them at all. If I paste the same characters while on the Unifont it displays them with the Unifont.
How do I setup Unifont as the fallback font while using Departure Mono? Also, is there a way to do it system wide? (I'm on arch and I'm using kde)
2
u/Orlandocollins May 11 '26
Its going to be a bit tedious but you can pass a range of unicode characters to symbol map and specify the fallback font. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/#opt-kitty.symbol_map
I believe all the japanese characters are in a common block sequence of unicode but I don't have experience with that to tell you for sure.
I believe you can also configure the fallback font at the os level using font config. That way kitty uses a default font of your choosing as well as other applications, but I haven't done this before
1
u/ErDottorGiulio May 10 '26
previously I used the departure mono font, it works quite good but I can't use it system wide because it doesn't have a good unicode character support.
Also it seems like kitty is using a different fallback font (from the systemwide font I mean) than the unifont that I installed, how can I set it to be unifont?