If you want the testing fonts, you add:
/etc/apt/sources.d/fonts.list:
deb http://http.debian.net/debian sid main contrib non-free
and
/etc/apt/preferences.d/pinning:
Package: fonts-* Pin: release a=testing Pin-Priority: 600
(priority between 500 and 989 means "causes a version to be installed unless there is a version available belonging to the target release or the installed version is more recent")
and after you apt update, you have access to sid.
1. add a limited set of fonts (requires sudo privileges)
2. pin those using an arbitrary number between two more arbitrary numbers, hope it doesn't break anything else. if it does break I'm sure there's a few pages of documentation you can sift through (also requires sudo privileges)
3. run another sudo command to update your local list of available packages
4. finally, use sudo to install your font
I'm not the target user here since I'm usually happy enough with whatever font is available by default from apt, but that makes this tool (as nice as I'm sure it is for the intended users):
1. Install new package manager for a special category of packages
2. Learn/use different syntax for installing/searching/updating/removing
3. Remember in 6 months I even installed this thing, when I feel like a font change
You do need root privileges if you want to install font packages so that everyone on the system can use them. If you only have yourself as a user, you can just drop ttf or otf files in an appropriate $HOME subdir.
You can also build yourself a read-only disk image and run overlay, or run NIXos, or guix, or whatever. I find it baffling that you find it desirable to sneer at instructions on how to do things appropriately for the specific system that is being referenced.
Hopefully other people will find some value in what I wrote.
Good to know there are some fonts on apt, though!
and for that matter, brew on mac
A good font can make a big difference if you are in the terminal or editor all day. It's a pain to get unity between them though.
The real mess, sadly, is configuring all your apps and such to use different fonts. There are an unbelievable amount of obscure configs, tweak tools, etc. if you want to change system fonts.
And the font-selector dropdowns become unusable.
So I started manually moving stuff from /usr/share/fonts/ and ./.local/share/fonts/ into per-project archive folders. A lot of work, that a font-manager could easily do much better. Worse: manually moving stuff from /usr/share/fonts/ can and will bring them back "unexpected" on updates or reinstallation - though there are probably hardly ever updates for font packages.
I would love a tool like fnt to manage this for me, but it seems fnt is more for installing and less for "dis- and enabling" them per theme/project etc.
Isn't this an old Windows bug, where GIMP would recreate the font cache on every start? I don't think I've ever seen any noticeable delay on Linux. (I have hundreds to thousands of fonts installed.)
1. No GUI needed
2. Discoverable and searchable directly through Brew
It's just, I personally can't imagine installing a new font without actually looking at it first. I know this provides an ascii art preview, but I'd need a more precise rendering.
Doesn't support fnt yet, but after this post I give it a week or so.
