A retro-modern adaptation of the DEC VT220 font, with nerd font symbols and common (for me) accents.

Originally, there was the font used in DEC VT220 terminals. Those fonts can be extracted from the ROM of a an old VT220 terminal, but due to the way the hardware painted the screen, they won't look right if you just draw those bitmaps to the screen. Paul Flo Williams described the complexity and published a PNG sample of those fonts over at vt100.net in 2006.

Viacheslav Slavinsky then converted that PNG into Glass TTY, a TrueType font (TTF) so that they could be used as a font in a modern application. Here's his description of the process, and corresponding Github repository. It still doesn't account for phosphor effects as pointed out by Norbert Landsteiner over at mass:work, but it gets pretty close.

Glass TTY is wonderful, but it has two main shortcomings for my use:

• It is missing some accent forms that come up frequently in my franglais usage.
• It does not support nerd font glyphs.

This is a variant of Glass TTY, with additional accent forms, smart quotes, etc, and patched using the Nerd Font Patcher (via nix). The idea of nerd fonts is to include icons and logos used in many “nerds'” terminals -- such as the vim icon, folders, branching symbols (e.g. for Git), and so on. They don't look at all in place with this font, but they look better than nothing, and maybe some day I'll get around to patching those symbols to look more in place here. Today is not that day.

Finally, while the Glass TTY font does include accents, it only includes the non-combining variants. (In unicode, you could write the é in café several ways: as the character é or as an e combined with a ́ (that's e + ' accent in case it doesn't render correctly here). I have added those combining accents for my common use (acute, grave, dieresis, circumflex, etc), and some other missing or misplaced characters: œ, Œ, “smart” quotes, etc.

James Eagan