Option for displaying nerd font icons in full width with the mono variants

[wsx-udscbt]

Glad to see nerd font icons are added natively in 0.830, and those icons are scaled down to fit the width constraint of the mono variants.
Although I understand the logic behind this decision, they are still visually unpleasant in many cases and leads to confusions like #274.

Related to this issue, I notice the kitty terminal has implemented a nice technique here.
Using the snowflake emoji as an example, when showing by itself as ❄, a strictly half-width glyph is used, and when followed by a space ❄ , a full-width glyph is displayed.
I think a similar trick can be implemented in PragmataPro Mono Liga using ligature (?) to show nerd font icons as half-width by default, and display their full-width version when followed by a space.
I would argue that this works well visually in almost all cases, and solves the problem without introducing yet another PragmataPro Mono variant but with full-width icons.
That said, I have no idea how feasible can this be implemented on the font level.

[fabrizioschiavi]

This is a very good idea! I think it solves brillantly this "micro-icons" issue.
Do you think can interfer with some other IDE settings?

[wsx-udscbt]

Thanks for the quick reply!

Do you think can interfer with some other IDE settings?

Not that I can think of, although I don't use PragmataPro normally in an IDE.
And I believe those nerd font icons have little use in most IDEs, where the GUI can simply draw those icons natively.

On the topic of full-width icons, maybe this is also a good chance to tune their sizing and spacing a bit.
For example, I find the desktop icon ( U+F108) slightly oversized (not much side bearings) compared to the folder icon ( U+EA83).
Is there an automated way to scale those icons to achieve comfortable and consistent side bearings/sizes, or they have to be tuned on a case-by-case basis manually?

[fabrizioschiavi]

You've right, at least the width of these icons must be constistent.
Unfortunately they have to be tuned on a case-by-case basis manually…
The design of all these 9,236 Nerd icons comes from the ufficial Nerd repo.
I'll do my best to improve the consistency of these icons.