Add font ligatures to your Alacritty

This article helps you to enable font ligatures on your Alacritty terminal.

We know that Alacritty does not support font ligatures. However, we stick to it due to its performance excellence.

Although, you have good news! Someone made it possible. See the fork of the Alacritty repository with the added font ligatures.

https://github.com/zenixls2/alacritty

Tl;dr

To solve the problem, let's build the repository and install the output binary on our system. Below are the steps to your destiny.

1. Clone the repository and build it
2. Backup the existing binary and install the new one.

How to do it?

Before we clone and build the repo, you should make sure you have the necessary build tools to build the application. The Rust is used to write the Alacritty. Therefore, you must ensure you have cargo installed on your system

 sudo apt install cargo

• Now, let's clone the repo using the below command.

git clone https://github.com/zenixls2/alacritty

• Use the following commands to build.

cd alacritty
git checkout ligature
cargo build --release

• If all goes well, this should place a binary at target/release/alacritty

Install the binary

We got the binary file after the build. Now, we only need to move it to the right place. For that, we should backup the existing binary file and use the new one.

• Backup the existing binary using this command

sudo mv /usr/bin/alacritty /usr/bin/alacritty.bak

• Then, let's copy our build binary to the /usr/bin folder.

sudo cp ./target/release/alacritty /usr/bin

• Also make sure you have the right font-family on your alacritty config.

font:
  normal:
    family: Fira Code
    style: Regular
  bold:
    family: Fira Code
    style: Bold
  italic:
    family: Fira Code
    style: Italic

There you go!

Relaunch the terminal and see the magic.

Conclusion

We have covered all the steps to enable the font ligatures on the alacritty terminal. Hope this article helps you.