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freetype_pcf_long_family_names = false

Since: Version 20220624-141144-bd1b7c5d

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

This option provides control over the no-long-family-names FreeType PCF font driver property.

The default is for this configuration to be false which sets the PCF driver to use the un-decorated font name. This corresponds to the default mode of operation of the freetype library.

Some Linux distributions build the freetype library in a way that causes the PCF driver to report font names differently; instead of reporting just Terminus it will prefix the font name with the foundry (xos4 in the case of Terminus) and potentially append Wide to the name if the font has wide glyphs. The purpose of that configuration option is to disambiguate fonts, as there are a number of fonts from different foundries that all have the name Fixed, and being presented with multiple items with the same Fixed label is a very ambiguous user experience.

When two different applications have differing values for this long family names property, they will face inconsistencies in resolving fonts by name as they will disagree on what the name of a given PCF font is.

When should you set this option to true?

If all of the following are true, then you should set this option to true:

  • You need to use PCF fonts and you need to use fontconfig to resolve their names to font files.
  • You are using a Linux distribution that builds their FreeType library with PCF_CONFIG_OPTION_LONG_FAMILY_NAMES defined.

Note that PCF fonts are a legacy font format and you will be better served by OTF, TTF or OTB (open type binary) file formats.

Why doesn't wezterm use the distro FreeType or match its configuration?

For the sake of consistency, wezterm vendors in its own copy of the latest version FreeType and builds that same version on all platforms. The result is that font-related behaviors in a given version of wezterm are the same on all platforms regardless of what (potentially old) version of FreeType may be provided by the distribution.

Not only does this provide consistency at runtime, but it is much simpler to reason about at build time, making it simpler to build wezterm on all systems.