GNU Guix System: Fonts, icons and cursors

This is a follow up to “Use Adwaita cursors in the GNU Guix System”.

NOTE: Please read the EDIT.

1 Icons and cursors

For icons and cursors to be usable, I found that you may need to link $GUIX_PROFILE/share/icons to $HOME/.icons.

ln -sf "$GUIX_PROFILE/share/icons" "$HOME/.icons"

After that, you can do something like change your cursor from your $HOME/.Xresources:

Xcursor.theme: THEME_NAME_HERE

and load the new settings with xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources. Note that your window manager may need a restart to properly pick up the changes.

2 Fonts

I read somewhere that Guix’s fontconfig should pick up fonts from $GUIX_PROFILE/share/fonts. I don’t know how fontconfig works but I can say that IceCat couldn’t find any of the fonts I manually installed. fc-list ¹also didn’t report anything other than what I got on the system when I intially installed it.

If you experience the same problem, link $GUIX_PROFILE/share/fonts/ to $HOME/.fonts.

ln -sf "$GUIX_PROFILE/share/fonts" "$HOME/.fonts"

Fonts installed by Guix should now be shown by fc-list and should be available to select from your programs. If not, try to update your cache first: fc-cache -f.

2.1 EDIT <2020-02-22 Sat>

I wouldn’t recommend doing this anymore. Some programs will want to write to your ~/.fonts directory. I also removed my .fonts symlink completely and Guix still recognized my fonts. When I install any new ones, all I have to do is run fc-cache -f.

Footnotes:

Both fc-list and fc-cache are part of the fontconfig package.