Airline fancy symbols missing

Question

I installed the powerline patched fonts by following the wiki at https://powerline.readthedocs.io/en/master/installation/linux.html#patched-font-installation

I selected the patched font and added:

let g:airline_powerline_fonts = 1

to my .vimrc

But I still see wrong symbols. How can I fix this?

Answer 1

I remember having a similar problem. I never really solved it but worked my way around it by installing the Hack font and by putting the following in my .vimrc:

set guifont=Hack:h10:cANSI

" Airline
let g:airline_powerline_fonts = 1

if !exists('g:airline_symbols')
    let g:airline_symbols = {}
endif

" unicode symbols
let g:airline_left_sep = '»'
let g:airline_left_sep = '▶'
let g:airline_right_sep = '«'
let g:airline_right_sep = '◀'
let g:airline_symbols.linenr = '␊'
let g:airline_symbols.linenr = '␤'
let g:airline_symbols.linenr = '¶'
let g:airline_symbols.branch = '⎇'
let g:airline_symbols.paste = 'ρ'
let g:airline_symbols.paste = 'Þ'
let g:airline_symbols.paste = '∥'
let g:airline_symbols.whitespace = 'Ξ'

" airline symbols
let g:airline_left_sep = ''
let g:airline_left_alt_sep = ''
let g:airline_right_sep = ''
let g:airline_right_alt_sep = ''
let g:airline_symbols.branch = ''
let g:airline_symbols.readonly = ''
let g:airline_symbols.linenr = ''

Some of the unicode characters are not recognized by my browser, but vim will know what to do if you copy paste it.

Answer 2

Looking at the image you commented on Octaviour's answer, I realise it is similar to a problem that I had for setting up vim-airline. Sure, I installed the Powerline fonts, but those weird symbols still appeared.

To fix this, I added the line

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

at the end of my /etc/profile by editing it as root. I am not really sure as to how this works, but form what I can tell, it sets the encoding on your computer to UTF-8. (And you may want to change the en_US to whatever language you prefer)

Answer 3

Be sure to properly set the guifont variable to the particular powerline font name and size you want to use. Excerpt for your .vimrc:

" use powerline symbols (supported by the hack font family)
let g:airline_powerline_fonts = 1

" set font for GUI vim
if has("gui_running")
    if has("win32")
      set guifont=Hack:h9:cANSI:qDRAFT
    else
      set guifont=Hack\ 11
    endif
endif

I was facing the same problem with gvim on debian with gnome and only solved it after using the "Select Font..." dialog from within gvim.

That is how I discovered that the guifont variable setting for gvim on debian is different from Windows. This is also mentioned at http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Change_font.