Using Powerline Symbols With ZSH

Recently, I tried to install the agnoster theme with zsh. However, a bunch of symbols appeared instead of the powerline font. I installed one of the provided patched powerline fonts to fix it, but it still didn’t work.

I did a bit of Googling and found that I needed to install the PowerlineSymbols font, which is basically a font that just adds on to your current font. Here’s the steps I took to get things working.

1. Download PowerlineSymbols.otf to your ~/.fonts/ directory using curl https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline/raw/develop/font/PowerlineSymbols.otf -LO

2. Run fc-cache -vf ~/.fonts to refresh the font cache and thus install the font.

3. Download 10-powerline-symbols.conf to your ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/ using curl https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline/raw/develop/font/10-powerline-symbols.conf -LO

Once you’ve done things, this should work. If not, you may need to restart your terminal or even your entire computer. You can also change your theme to the agnoster theme by changing your theme in your ~/.zshrc.

Source: Powerline documentation