Fix broken powerline symbols in agy

If agy-powerline's bar shows boxes, question marks or gaps where the round caps and arrows should be, your terminal's font doesn't have the powerline glyphs. There are two fixes: use a Nerd Font in your terminal, or switch the bar to ASCII mode, which needs no special font.

• Check what your terminal can draw
• Option 1: install a Nerd Font
• Option 2: ASCII mode
• Emojis and wide characters

Check what your terminal can draw

npx agy-powerline doctor

doctor prints a glyph test line with a powerline cap, a branch symbol and a few emojis. If some of them show as boxes, the font is missing them. npx agy-powerline render --demo prints a full sample bar, so you can see the result of a change right away.

Option 1: install a Nerd Font

Nerd Fonts are programming fonts patched with the powerline glyphs and icons. Download one from nerdfonts.com (JetBrains Mono, Fira Code and Cascadia Code all have Nerd Font versions), install it, then select it in your terminal. On macOS with Homebrew: brew install --cask font-jetbrains-mono-nerd-font.

Select it in the terminal agy runs in:

• Windows Terminal: Settings → your profile (PowerShell, Command Prompt or Ubuntu) → Appearance → Font face.
• VS Code's terminal: set terminal.integrated.fontFamily to the font's name, for example "JetBrainsMono Nerd Font".
• macOS Terminal: Settings → Profiles → Text → Font.
• iTerm2: Settings → Profiles → Text → Font.
• GNOME Terminal: Preferences → your profile → Custom font.
• WSL: the font belongs to the Windows terminal around it (Windows Terminal or VS Code), not to Linux, so install it on Windows.

Restart the terminal, then run render --demo again.

Option 2: ASCII mode

ASCII mode draws the bar with plain characters that every font has: caps and separators become [ ], < > and /, dot meters become # and -, and emojis turn off.

• Press i in npx agy-powerline configure, or
• set "ascii": true in ~/.agy-powerline/statusline.config.json, or
• set the environment variable AGY_POWERLINE_ASCII=1.

The browser configurator has an ASCII Mode switch too, with a live preview.

You can also keep a Nerd Font–free look without ASCII mode: the flat powerline style (npx agy-powerline caps flat) draws pills without round or angled caps, and the Lines and Classic layouts (npx agy-powerline layout lines) use no powerline glyphs at all.

Emojis and wide characters

Widget icons are emojis. If they show as boxes or push the bar out of line, your terminal's emoji support is the cause, not the font. Turn icons off with e in configure (or "emojis": false), or turn on minimalist mode (m) to show values only. More on colors, narrow windows and ASCII mode: Terminals.