Month: September 2018

I managed to get vim in the terminal using the system clipboard by using a version compiled with +clipboard and using set clipboard=unnamed in .vimrc. But I wanted to go one further and have the last entry in my emacs-like kill-ring in bash go to the system clipboard too. So that when I hit Ctrl-k on the commandline I can Cmd-v that text into my text editor (or anywhere). Turns out this is pretty tricky.

The best solution I have so far is courtesy of user3439894 on the Apple Stack Exchange. It requires me to use Ctrl-Shift-k to kill instead of Ctrl-k but otherwise does what I want pretty well. You can find the gory details at https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/336361/301884.

On pennydreadfulmagic.com we use a bunch of unicode symbols for everything from pagination (←→) to tagging external links (↑) to indicating that a specific card has a bug (🐞).

Lots of these symbols are present in the glyphs of our main body text font. But some are not. These rely on the system of the viewer to display. Sometimes they look ugly and sometimes they aren’t present at all and get the ugly square box treatment.

To work around this I want to supply a font that provides versions of the glyphs that aren’t present in the base font. But something fonts like Symbola that provide complete coverage of unicode start at about 1.5MB and go up. That’s a high price to pay for a handful of symbols!

One solution is font subsetting. You can make a version of a font that only contains the symbols you are going to use. It will be much smaller. Our subsetted version of Symbola is more like 15KB as an inline woff in the CSS file. A big saving.

You can subset fonts online very simply with the super useful Transfonter.