This is the font my zsh prompt uses. It is JetBrains Mono with seven Font Awesome icons merged in, and nothing else.
My prompt shows a small set of icons: an OS logo, a home marker, a clock, a calendar, and a git branch. Those glyphs are not in ordinary fonts. The usual fix is a prebuilt Nerd Font, but I did not want to go that way. The Meslo font I had traces back to Apple’s Menlo and still carries an Apple copyright and trademark, so its license is murky, and I would rather not depend on the Nerd Fonts project’s prebuilt binaries either.
So I patch my own from two first-party projects under clear open licenses: JetBrains Mono for the text, Font Awesome for the icons. The build is reproducible and every download is checksummed, so I know exactly what went in.
JetBrains Mono, Regular and Bold, with these seven glyphs copied from Font Awesome 4.7:
home U+F015 · clock U+F017 · calendar U+F073 · laptop U+F109 · code-fork U+F126 · apple U+F179 · linux U+F17C
The family is renamed JetBrainsMono FA so it never clashes with a stock JetBrains Mono install. Nothing else is added, which keeps the file small and the licensing simple.
FontForge does the merge, and it is not a pip package, so install it from your OS first:
macOS: brew install fontforge
Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install fontforge python3-fontforge
Fedora/RHEL: sudo dnf install fontforge
Then run the one command:
python3 build_font.py
The script downloads the pinned JetBrains Mono release and the Font Awesome webfont into a temp dir, merges the seven glyphs through FontForge, checks that every one made it in, and writes the patched TTFs, the two license files, and BUILD-PROVENANCE.txt into this folder. The temp dir is deleted when it finishes.
Building it does not install it. Copy the TTF into your OS font directory, then select JetBrainsMono FA in your terminal.
macOS: cp JetBrainsMonoFA-*.ttf ~/Library/Fonts/
Linux: cp JetBrainsMonoFA-*.ttf ~/.local/share/fonts/ && fc-cache -f
Both fonts are SIL Open Font License 1.1, and both licenses ship here.
LICENSE-JetBrainsMono.txt, https://github.com/JetBrains/JetBrainsMonoLICENSE-FontAwesome.txt, https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-AwesomeNo Nerd Fonts code or glyphs are used, so nothing from that project needs attributing.