cell_width = 1.0

Since: Version 20220624-141144-bd1b7c5d

The functionality described in this section requires version 20220624-141144-bd1b7c5d of wezterm, or a more recent version.

Scales the computed cell width to adjust the spacing between successive cells of text.

If possible, you should prefer to specify the stretch parameter when selecting a font using wezterm.font or wezterm.font_with_fallback as that will generally look better and have fewer undesirable side effects.

If your preferred font doesn't have variations with different stretches, or if the font spacing still doesn't look right to you, then cell_width gives you a simple way to influence the spacing.

The default cell width is indirectly controlled by the font and font_size configuration options; the selected font and font size controls the height of the font, while the font designer controls the aspect ratio of the glyphs in the font. The base font (the first font resolved from your font configuration) defines the cell metrics for the terminal display grid, and those metrics are then used to place glyphs, regardless of which fallback font might be resolved for a given glyph.

If you feel that your chosen font feels too horizontally cramped then you can set cell_width = 1.2 to increase the horizontal spacing by 20%. Conversely, setting cell_width = 0.9 will decrease the horizontal spacing by 10%.

This option doesn't adjust the rasterized width of glyphs, it just changes what wezterm considers to be the cell boundaries. When rendering monospace, wezterm advances by the cell width to place successive glyphs.

If you set the scale less than 1.0 then the glyphs won't be truncated or squished, but will render over the top of each other. Conversely, if you set the scale to greater than 1.0, the glyphs won't be stretched but will render further apart from each other.

Changing cell_width doesn't adjust the positioning of the glyph within the cell: it remains at its usual x-position. It is not centered within the adjusted space.

Changing cell_width may have undesirable consequences, especially for fonts that use ligatures: depending on the font, you may find that some ligatured sequences are misaligned or render strangely. This is not a bug: the font is designed to be rendered with a cell_width = 1.0, so running with a different value will have this sort of side effect.

See also: line_height