Installing powerline fonts for zsh + Prezto theme

If you're a macOS user, the Powerline glyphs are now built-in to iTerm (as of 3.3.7, 17 Nov 2019) but disabled by default.

You can enable the fonts by toggling the checkbox in iTerm > Preferences > Profiles > Text:

iTerm2 Preferences Showing Powerline Fonts Checkbox Option

Any newly opened Terminal windows will render supported Unicode characters as glyphs, as shown the following screenshot test.

$ echo "\ue0b0 \u00b1 \ue0a0 \u27a6 \u2718 \u26a1 \u2699"

Screenshot of iTerm Window with Powerline Symbols font


If you'd rather manually manage the installation of the Powerline Symbols, you can use Homebrew Casks:

$ brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts

$ brew cask install font-powerline-symbols

This will install the PowerlineSymbols.otf typeface for you to use system-wide.


It is all about the Powerline symbols.

To get the Powerline symbols working as [email protected] has:

  1. Download a Powerline font. A good font for downloading can be found at https://github.com/powerline/fonts

  2. Install it by running ./install.sh.

  3. Change the font in your Terminal preferences to use the new Powerline font.

enter image description here

  1. Test! To test the glyphs in a terminal: echo "\ue0b0 \u00b1 \ue0a0 \u27a6 \u2718 \u26a1 \u2699"

enter image description here

The prior instructions were intended for Mac OS version 10.11 with Terminal, but may work similar for other setups.


On Windows - just * download some Powerline font like: https://github.com/abertsch/Menlo-for-Powerline/raw/master/Menlo%20for%20Powerline.ttf
* Install it by clicking the file twice
* Choose the new font in properties
That's it!