Fontpreview
Version: GIT Web: https://github.com/ sdushantha/fontpreview
About half a year ago the GNOME design team announced a bunch of new desktop applications, including a graphical manager for system fonts. Right now there is no Gnome-friendly equivalent of Kfontview, but we’ve got some good news. Instead of waiting for the new GNOME mockup to come into existence, how about this great font preview tool – powerful, robust and fully desktop-agnostic.
Fontpreview is a command-line utility that wraps around such tools as FZF (fuzzy command-line search), Sxiv (Imlib-based image viewer) and Xdotool (input device emulator). The purpose is to provide an easy way of previewing Truetype/opentype fonts without leaving your beloved CLI session. As long as it is a desktoporiented app, Fontpreview fits best into a tile-based environment. The GIF demonstrating the typical usage of Fontpreview supposedly features an i3-based setup. One tile is your terminal, while another is the sxiv preview window. Currently, due to sxiv being tied to X11, Fontpreview only works with Xorg and Xwayland and not the Wayland-only sessions (we hope it’s not an issue).
When launched without arguments, Fontpreview simply lists the installed fonts and draws their previews as a black-coloured alphabet over a white background. However, many of the defaults can be changed like this: $ fontpreview –bg-color red –fg-color white preview-text “Glum Schwartzkopf \n vex’d by
NJ IQ”
Apart from playing with acid colours and spicy pangrams, we can also define the position of the preview window (--position) and better integrate the application with our tiling window manager. Fuzzy search does an amazing job in Fontpreview, allowing you to locate desired fonts even if they have odd names.
Fontpreview is easy to install – just clone the project somewhere and put the executable fontpreview script to the place in your $PATH. If Fontpreview is missing some dependencies, it will politely let you know about it.