GNU Guix System: Fonts, 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.

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 also 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.