Patch Berkeley Mono Font with Nerd Fonts
Intro
There is a font that I’m currently obsessed with: Berkeley Mono Font. Berkeley Mono is a great and aesthetic font for software engineers. As they claimed:
“By software engineers, for software engineers.”
You can check it out here https://neil.computer/notes/introducing-berkeley-mono and here https://berkeleygraphics.com/typefaces/berkeley-mono.
Problem
However there is a problem: I can’t use this font in my IDE since there is a no icons (devicons, codicons etc.) comes by default.

As you can see there are only ugly bold colorful columns instead of icons.
Solution
The solution is manually patching Berkeley Mono Font with Nerds Fonts Patcher to add these icons.
Nerd Fonts adds ~9K icons after patching.
You can customize these icon list with flags from patch script.
Patch
There are a lot methods to patch fonts, but I’m going to use docker
way.
General command for patching from docker is:
$ docker run --rm -v /path/to/fonts:/in -v /path/for/output:/out nerdfonts/patcher [OPTIONS]
You can see all OPTIONS
here:
OPTIONS
usage: font-patcher [-h] [-v] [-s] [-l] [-q] [-w] [-c] [--careful]
[--removeligs] [--postprocess [POSTPROCESS]]
[--configfile [CONFIGFILE]] [--custom [CUSTOM]]
[-ext [EXTENSION]] [-out [OUTPUTDIR]]
[--glyphdir [GLYPHDIR]] [--makegroups]
[--variable-width-glyphs]
[--progressbars | --no-progressbars] [--also-windows]
[--fontawesome] [--fontawesomeextension] [--fontlogos]
[--octicons] [--codicons] [--powersymbols] [--pomicons]
[--powerline] [--powerlineextra] [--material] [--weather]
font
Nerd Fonts Font Patcher: patches a given font with programming and development related glyphs
* Website: https://www.nerdfonts.com
* Version: 2.2.2
* Development Website: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts
* Changelog: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/blob/-/changelog.md
positional arguments:
font The path to the font to patch (e.g., Inconsolata.otf)
options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-v, --version show program's version number and exit
-s, --mono, --use-single-width-glyphs
Whether to generate the glyphs as single-width not double-width (default is double-width)
-l, --adjust-line-height
Whether to adjust line heights (attempt to center powerline separators more evenly)
-q, --quiet, --shutup
Do not generate verbose output
-w, --windows Limit the internal font name to 31 characters (for Windows compatibility)
-c, --complete Add all available Glyphs
--careful Do not overwrite existing glyphs if detected
--removeligs, --removeligatures
Removes ligatures specificed in JSON configuration file
--postprocess [POSTPROCESS]
Specify a Script for Post Processing
--configfile [CONFIGFILE]
Specify a file path for JSON configuration file (see sample: src/config.sample.json)
--custom [CUSTOM] Specify a custom symbol font. All new glyphs will be copied, with no scaling applied.
-ext [EXTENSION], --extension [EXTENSION]
Change font file type to create (e.g., ttf, otf)
-out [OUTPUTDIR], --outputdir [OUTPUTDIR]
The directory to output the patched font file to
--glyphdir [GLYPHDIR]
Path to glyphs to be used for patching
--makegroups Use alternative method to name patched fonts (experimental)
--variable-width-glyphs
Do not adjust advance width (no "overhang")
--progressbars Show percentage completion progress bars per Glyph Set
--no-progressbars Don't show percentage completion progress bars per Glyph Set
--also-windows Create two fonts, the normal and the --windows version
Symbol Fonts:
--fontawesome Add Font Awesome Glyphs (http://fontawesome.io/)
--fontawesomeextension
Add Font Awesome Extension Glyphs (https://andrelzgava.github.io/font-awesome-extension/)
--fontlogos, --fontlinux
Add Font Logos Glyphs (https://github.com/Lukas-W/font-logos)
--octicons Add Octicons Glyphs (https://octicons.github.com)
--codicons Add Codicons Glyphs (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-codicons)
--powersymbols Add IEC Power Symbols (https://unicodepowersymbol.com/)
--pomicons Add Pomicon Glyphs (https://github.com/gabrielelana/pomicons)
--powerline Add Powerline Glyphs
--powerlineextra Add Powerline Glyphs (https://github.com/ryanoasis/powerline-extra-symbols)
--material, --materialdesignicons, --mdi
Add Material Design Icons (https://github.com/templarian/MaterialDesign)
--weather, --weathericons
Add Weather Icons (https://github.com/erikflowers/weather-icons)
Note
If you don’t add any flag
/option
, you’d probably not get the desired icons.
This was the case I was pondering and trying to solve for a while.
Info
- My
nerdfonts/patcher
image hash is97a878c9721e934d02802e9eaa14b593d49b90bdf52585e0def2fe7f1a75f014
. - Patch script version is
2.2.2
In order to get all icons run below command:
docker run --rm \
-v /tmp/berkeley-mono/origin:/in \
-v /tmp/berkeley-mono/patched:/out \
nerdfonts/patcher \
--progressbars \
--mono \
--adjust-line-height \
--fontawesome \
--fontawesomeextension \
--fontlogos \
--octicons \
--codicons \
--powersymbols \
--pomicons \
--powerline \
--powerlineextra \
--material \
--weather
Don’t forget to modify the paths according to your current ones.
After the command completed, copy patched fonts into your OS
’s font directory.
If MacOS, it’s ~/Library/Fonts
:
$ cp /tmp/berkeley-mono/patched/*.ttf ~/Library/Fonts
If it’s Debian/Ubuntu, use local directory ${XDG_DATA_HOME}/fonts
.
# $XDG_DATA_HOME is ~/.local/share
# More info: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Base_Directory
$ cp /tmp/berkeley-mono/patched/*.ttf ${XDG_DATA_HOME}/fonts
# Reset/Rebuild the font cache
$ fc-cache -f -v
Info
You may see over the internet the local font directory is ~/.fonts
. However
for newer versions of OS you can place them under ~/.local/share/fonts
. I
don’t want polluted ~/
- $HOME
directory.
If you want the font system-wide available, use the global font directory which
is /usr/local/share/font
.
If it’s Windows -hell no, I don’t know :)
The final version of patched Berkeley Mono font should look like below:

Now it’s completely great font for developing.
All done!