Using nerd fonts icons has some standing issues, like SSH-support (need to install/configure them on hosts or you'll see wrong icons), bad unicode assignment leading to unusable icons, hard to add new icons to the list (#370), and of course, be quite a bloated package (lots of icons we don't use, and fonts have lots of unnecessarily duplicated characters).

I have a plan for us to move away from nerd fonts, in two stages:

#Stage 1 - statusbar icons

Use a ligature font for the statusbar.

• [X] Add icons for cellular bars - done in fork
• [-] Add icons for modem status -- WIP in fork
• [ ] Add icons for modem errors
• [-] patch ascii from font (currently usable but maybe has font metadata issues)
• [ ] write a really good fontconfig so this can be used by only specifying one font?
• [ ] get ~grmat to merge in changes and tag release.
• [ ] add otf-statusbar to alpine linux, patched with our favorite fonts (and shipping with a good fontconfig)
• [ ] config sway-bar and dwm to use the ligature font (with fallback for other characters?) for the status bar.

#Stage 2 Use emojis for the rest of the icons

I've been doing this in my dotfiles for a while.

Complaints about emoji icons largely center about mismatched widths and color presentation. I believe these quirks can be fixed by updating to a well-supported black-and-white emoji font and making sure bemenu/dmenu is configured to use it.

• [-] Replace icons with their emoji equivalents
• [ ] Figure out replacements for some icons that don't (yet?) have emojis (wifi, bluetooth, app grid, menu list, generic list, modem, wifi, usb)
• [ ] Remove the branded icons. (Sorry vim and firefox lovers, not so sorry youtube and telegram users)
• [ ] Fix (or workaround) fontconfig so that the monotone emoji font is used when an application prefers that (but still allow people to see their favorite color emojis when wanted), or maybe just config bemenu/dmenu to use the b&w ones.