Patch SF Mono with Nerd Font Icons

8 January 2022

Patch a font to include Nerd Font icons using their font patcher script.

Requirements

There’s a Docker image that contains all the needed requirements, which is the approach I used. Check the ryanoasis/nerd-fonts repo docs for non-Docker approaches.

Why?

Mainly for the nice icons in Starship. Also to understand how to do it.

Note that there are some repos that have a pre-patched SF Mono available to download. But I wanted to see what was involved in doing it myself.

Steps

Install the unpatched font

Download SF Mono from developer.apple.com/fonts/

Run the installer

The files will be installed to /Library/Fonts/

You should see the following:

SF-Mono-Bold.otf
SF-Mono-BoldItalic.otf
SF-Mono-Heavy.otf
SF-Mono-HeavyItalic.otf
SF-Mono-Light.otf
SF-Mono-LightItalic.otf
SF-Mono-Medium.otf
SF-Mono-MediumItalic.otf
SF-Mono-Regular.otf
SF-Mono-RegularItalic.otf
SF-Mono-Semibold.otf
SF-Mono-SemiboldItalic.otf

Copy them out to somewhere like ~/Desktop/sf-mono-original.

Create the patched version

To create the patched font:

docker run --rm -v ~/Desktop/sf-mono-original:/in -v ~/Desktop/sf-mono-patched:/out nerdfonts/patcher --powerline --use-single-width-glyphs

The output directory ~/Desktop/sf-mono-patched will be created for you. When the conversion is finished open Font Book, and drag the patched fonts in to install them. Font Book might complain about some errors. No idea if they cause problems, I just ignored them.

The patched font name will be ‘SFMono Nerd Font Mono’, and should contain the NerdFont Powerline glyphs.