Vi and Vim Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people using the vi and Vim families of text editors. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Following the answers in I have tried many varieties of setting the font size and face in ~/.vimrc . None of them have any effect
set guifont=Menlo:h12
set guifont=Monaco:h12
set guifont=Menlo\ Regular:h12
Note that executing
:set gfn=*
does bring up a font chooser dialog - and I am able to choose either Monaco or Menlo or many others correctly. But I don't want to have to choose every time - thus the ~/.vimrc . What might be wrong how to fix this?
Since font is specific to the GUI versions of vim (i.e. gvim and macvim), you need to should put the set guifont=... line in your gvimrc.
A good place for that is ~/.vim/gvimrc, but you can read help gvimrc for locations.
According to setting-guifont:
*setting-guifont*
When you use the same vimrc file on various systems, you can use something
like this to set options specifically for each type of GUI:
if has("gui_running")
if has("gui_gtk2")
:set guifont=Luxi\ Mono\ 12
elseif has("x11")
" Also for GTK 1
:set guifont=*-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-*-*-180-*-*-m-*-*
elseif has("gui_win32")
:set guifont=Luxi_Mono:h12:cANSI
elseif has("gui_macvim")
:set guifont=DejaVu\ Sans\ Mono:h13
endif
endif
So this would indicate guifont should be set only when has('gui_running') is true—i.e., when the gui is started or about to start.
I can't find anything that requires this in help macvim, help gui, or help gui-init.
set gfn=... and such in vimrc only if GUI load is delayed, like in Neovim, for example.
I had the same problem as the OP after upgrading from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04. Turns out the condition if has("gui_gtk2") in _vimc is no longer true, changed it to "gui_gtk3" as a wild guess and bingo! my fonts settings are working again.
Create/modify a file called.gvimrc in your home directory and add set guifont=DejaVu\ Sans\ Mono\ Book\ 12. Restart gvim to take effect.
You may find useful this plugin I made to simplify setting guifont in a portable way: https://github.com/awvalenti/vim-simple-guifont. Your vimrc goes like this and it handles all the OS specific stuff:
silent! call simple_guifont#Set(
['Cascadia Code PL', 'JetBrains Mono', 'Hack'], 'Consolas', 14)
:set gfn=*to choose one. Then see an exact name with:set gfn?MonacoandMenlodo show up in the dialog - as alluded in the actual question above.:set gfn?exactly shows after you've selected one of them? Could be, for example, "Menlo 12" instead of "Menlo:h12" etc.guifont=Menlo Regular:h14is what shows up without actually manually setting one of the fonts. If I select one of the fonts from the chooser that does set it properly. But the question above is about avoiding that for each fileset guifont=Menlo\ Regular:h12works fine for me in my.vimrc. Does it work for you if you run it manually from the command-line after start up? I presume other settings in your vimrc are taking effect? What's the output of:verbose set guifont?after start up?