icon-font

Omarchy Icon Font

Read this before adding a branded glyph to `default/fonts/omarchy/omarchy.ttf`.

The Omarchy icon font is a small private-use font carrying the marks Nerd Fonts does not have: the Omarchy logo and the agent and app brand marks. The menu draws one by naming the font on an entry:

"agent.harness.grok": {"icon":"","iconFont":"omarchy","label":"Grok", ...}

Without `iconFont`, an entry's `icon` is drawn in the menu font, so reach for this font only when a Nerd Font glyph would misrepresent the thing. A generic robot for four different AI apps is the case that justifies a real mark; a folder or a microphone is not.

`default/fonts/omarchy/README.md` lists every glyph with the URL its artwork came from. Keep that list accurate — it is the only record of provenance.

Adding a glyph

`omarchy dev font` does the work:

omarchy dev font list
omarchy dev font add ollama https://simpleicons.org/icons/ollama.svg

`add` fetches the SVG, scales it into the same 64..960 box the existing marks use so it lands at their optical size, appends it at the next free private-use codepoint, and adds a line to the font README. It prints the codepoint and the glyph itself.

The source must be a **monochrome SVG with a single `<path>`**, because the menu recolors the glyph with the active theme's foreground and selection colors. Brand icon sets such as <https://simpleicons.org> publish exactly that shape. App favicons usually do not: they are multi-color, carry a container tile, or split across several paths. Prefer the official mark when it is published as flat monochrome art, and fall back to an icon set's redraw when it is not.

Two-tone marks are a trap. Every path becomes solid foreground, so a logo whose meaning depends on lighter and darker halves turns into an unreadable blob. Pick a source whose silhouette alone reads.

After adding

The command prints these, and all of them matter:

• Point the menu entry at the new codepoint with `"iconFont":"omarchy"`.
• Check the README line the command added, and give it a proper display name

with `--label` if the glyph name is not the brand's name.

The font is package-owned: `omarchy-settings` installs it to `/usr/share/fonts/omarchy/omarchy.ttf`, so a new glyph reaches the desktop through a settings release, not through `omarchy update`. Between the merge and that release, a pulled checkout renders the new entry with no icon.

Verifying

Render the whole font and look at it, which catches inverted contours and filled counters that a glyph list cannot show:

python3 -c "open('/tmp/row.txt','w').write(' '.join(chr(c) for c in range(0xE900, 0xE910)))"
magick -background white -fill black -font default/fonts/omarchy/omarchy.ttf \
  -pointsize 110 label:@/tmp/row.txt /tmp/font-row.png

Then confirm it in the running menu per [`visual-verification.md`](visual-verification.md). Avoid leaving two fonts with the `omarchy` family registered: Qt can use an old copy in `~/.local/share/fonts` even when `fc-match omarchy` reports the packaged font. For a preview, either replace the packaged file in the disposable VM or temporarily exclude it with a `<rejectfont>` rule in `~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/` before loading the candidate.

Refresh the font cache and restart the shell afterwards — Qt reads the font database at startup, so `omarchy menu refresh` alone will not pick up a changed font. Remove temporary fonts and rules after verification.