RoyalTerminal : allowed font families, font width management & ligatures issues

Questions Royal TS (for Windows)
1

Hi @stefan_koell !

I spotted some issues with fonts in RoyalTerminal Ghossty implementation :confounded_face:

I usually configure every software that handle a monospace font with Iosevka/IosevakTerm and RoyalTS / Windows Terminal / VisualStudio[Code].
There is also a NerdFonts version when you need extended characters sets (like with Oh-My-Posh or Btop++). :winking_face_with_tongue:

While testing RoyalTerminal, I noticed few points:

  1. The font selector in Rebex/RoyalTerminal does not show the same list as for PuTTY
    a. It is limited to strict monospace fonts
    b. With PuTTY plugin you can also select proportional fonts
  2. In some case, there is a weird spacing between end of line and the cursor
    a. With mono font
    b. With size of 13, but not 12
  3. Ligatures are not enabled even with the option enabled

Regarding the first point:

  • The Iosevka & IoservkaTerm NerdFonts comme with 3 options:

    • Regular (NF version) with standard characters width but icons usually 1.5 normal width
    • Mono (NFM version) with every characters forced to the standard width
    • Proportional (NFP version) for some other cases

  • While the PuTTY plugin allow the use of all the versions (NF/NFM/NFP), the Rebex/RoyalTerminal only allow the NFM version

  • The difference between NF/NFM is more of a visual comfort with icons :

    image

    image
    While PuTTY isn’t able to handle variable width characters cells, Ghostty is clearly modern enough to be able to :wink:

For the second point:

  • This is the one I’ve mentionned yesterday and I finally found out how to reproduce it!
  • It seems to happen only with the Nerd Fonts Mono versions (I also tried with FiraCode NFM, same issue) but not with plain regular Cascadia Code :unamused_face:
  • When you type a pretty long line, the more you type the more the space between the last character and the cursor grow, same while pasting from clipboard
  • Changing the zoom level seems to correct the issue, but after reconnecting it do it again
  • Also, the startup zoom level does not seem to be 100% as CTRL+0 shrink the terminal text :thinking:
  • I’ve done a quick screencast to show this : RoyalTerm_font-width.mp4
  • I’ve also done a quick screencast of how native Ghostty behave with the same font/size under Fedora to compare : Ghostty_Fedora.mp4
  • I’ve tried to change various settings available (sixel graphics, text shaping, …) but didn’t find a combination that help :pensive_face:

And for the last point:

  • I’m not able to get ligatures working even with the dedicated option selected :

    image
    image458×164 2.81 KB

  • The font is natively ligatures capable, Windows Terminal & VSCode can display them correctly but it don’t work with RoyalTerminal (PuTTY is too old to know about ligatures :rofl:) : RoyalTerminal_Ligatures.mp4

Hope those will not be too hard to hunt :confounded_face::winking_face_with_tongue:

Best Regards,
Nicolas.

2

Thanks for the detailed feedback. The next release should address all the mentioned issues.