How to fix powerline fonts and symbols error in shell?

Question

I've installed Arch about a week ago, and since then I been struggling with the powerline fonts. But after installing the pkg powerline-fonts, I configured the .zshrc file by adding these lines:

 powerline-daemon -q 
. /usr/share/powerline/bindings/zsh/powerline.zsh

The best I could do is commenting the line in the .zshrcfile that chooses a specific theme and letting the above code to run, and looks like this: powerline-fonts fix.

Still, the oh-my-zsh themes don't work; for example this is the agnoster theme: agnoster theme.

Another issue I have is that the symbols or the numbers are not shown properly in the terminal, any terminal, for example when using broot:br listing or bat: bat

I think these problems are linked and that's why I've asked the two questions in one. My question is: How could I fix this and have the oh-my-zsh themes work properly? On my vm they look like this:agnoster-theme and bat. I would like to make them look identical.

Answer 1

Good Ol' Locale

One issue I have had come up is not having my locale set, which causes all sorts of headache and misery to befall the unaware. To set it, go to /etc/locale.gen and uncomment the US English locale: en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 then as root run locale-gen and as root again localectl set-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8 just to be extra sure. Then reboot and if the issue persists check out this guide from Arch Wiki and see if the steps there work for you.

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Alternative Installation Method

Additionally and to rule out another possible problem, you can try an alternative method of installing powerline, first you will need to download python-pip, then you will use it to download powerline.

sudo pacman -S git python
su -c 'pip install git+git://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline'

Now this new installation of powerline is in /usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/powerline/ so add the following to .zshrc

if [[ -r /usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/powerline/bindings/zsh/powerline.zsh ]]; then
  source /usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/powerline/bindings/zsh/powerline.zsh
fi

and you may want to alternatively install the powerline fonts, to do so try the below:

 wget https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline/raw/develop/font/PowerlineSymbols.otf https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline/raw/develop/font/10-powerline-symbols.conf
 sudo mv PowerlineSymbols.otf /usr/share/fonts/
 sudo fc-cache -vf
 sudo mv 10-powerline-symbols.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/

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This is not an exhaustive list, there is simply a lot of different avenues to pursue with rectifying this one which I haven't had come up in a long time (I scripted out my installation from ISO then another one provisions my dotfiles and installs my programs to taste, which spares me these headaches generally but causes a bunch of its own) but I do hope it helps or leads you along the right path!