I am using a headless install of NixOs as a server, I current use the fish shell with a custom Tide theme that requires ligatures. I use a nerd font to accomplish this. However, I have been unable to figure out how to get a custom font to work when I’m interacting with the machine physically.
Any ideas are appreciated!
You mean fonts for the TTY? I’m afraid the TTY can’t do ligatures (or even simpler typeface features).
Tip: You should be interacting with your server via ssh/mosh. That way you get all your desktop’s font support exactly the way you want it.
The linux virtual terminal is very barebone: you can configure it using the console.font, console.colors but that’s it. It supports only psf fonts and 16 ANSI colors, so no unicode or any other fancy OpenType stuff.
If you want something more sophisticated there’s kmscon (services.kmscon), which is an alternative virtual terminal implementation. I don’t know what kind of fonts it supports, though.