How to Use Custom Font in JetBrains Terminal

It was tantalizing. I have a favourite terminal font: an old IBM VGA variant. I also updated it with Nerd Fonts icons and glyphs. I can use it in Konsole, PyCharm, and WebStorm, but it wasn't selectable as a terminal font for either IDE’s reworked terminal.

I generated italic, bold, and bold-italic variants for it and even tweaked the font metadata, but it still never showed up as a selectable font in the terminal settings.

So I set it directly in the configuration file. And finally: it worked!

Here’s how you can do it too:

1.) Locate the config folder. ~/.config/JetBrains/PyCharmCE202?.?/options in my KDE Neon. It should be %APPDATA%\Roaming\JetBrains\PyCharm202?.?\options in Windows. For other products (like WebStorm), use the corresponding folder. Keep an eye on the version. You’ll probably want to use the most recent one.

2.) Open up your IDE. Set the desired font for the editor.

3.) Save or Apply the change then close the IDE.

4.) Open editor-font.xml. It will look like this:

<application>
  <component name="DefaultFont">
    <option name="VERSION" value="1" />
    <option name="FONT_SIZE" value="16" />
    <option name="FONT_SIZE_2D" value="16.0" />
    <option name="FONT_FAMILY" value="MxPlusIBMVGA9x16 Nerd Font Mono" />
    <option name="FONT_BOLD_SUB_FAMILY" value="Regular" />
  </component>
</application>

5.) Copy the line with the FONT_FAMILY setting. You can copy the whole file if you want to.

6.) Open terminal-font.xml. Its structure is the same. Paste or replace the FONT_FAMILY line.

7.) Launch your IDE again. Now, it will have the font you've just set:

You can set a different editor font after that. It won’t affect the terminal font. We simply used the editor’s setting to get the exact configuration to paste into the terminal’s configuration file.

You can also change the terminal font size from the UI without losing your font setting. But if you select a different terminal font, the custom one might disappear from the dropdown.