Debugging sway and i3status-rs

Recently I have been toying around with the sway compositor on Wayland in order to have a more lightweight setup with better support for keyboard-only interaction. However, because I have not used Arch Linux on my desktop for some time, I am re-learning a few things as I go as well.

I have followed the documentation on setting up i3status-rs on my machine and I pasted the initial config for sway from the website:

bar {
    font pango:Hack, FontAwesome 11
    ...
}

I realized later, was not working correctly and was showing 漢字 instead of font awesome icons. The reason why it took me so long to realize something was not working correctly was because I was also setting up correct locale setting in order to be able to render Japanese fonts correctly.

It seems that the author has also specified that it would be good to ensure that FontAwesome is pointing to the right font on one’s system, so let’s do that:

$ fc-match FontAwesome
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book

That’s unexpected, let’s see what pacman has installed on my system:

$ pacman -Ql ttf-font-awesome | rg fa-
ttf-font-awesome /usr/share/fonts/TTF/fa-brands-400.ttf
ttf-font-awesome /usr/share/fonts/TTF/fa-regular-400.ttf
ttf-font-awesome /usr/share/fonts/TTF/fa-solid-900.ttf
ttf-font-awesome /usr/share/fonts/TTF/fa-v4compatibility.ttf

Then we can check what names of the fonts we can use by:

$ fc-match -a | rg '^fa-'
fa-brands-400.ttf: "Font Awesome 6 Brands" "Regular"
fa-regular-400.ttf: "Font Awesome 6 Free" "Regular"
fa-v4compatibility.ttf: "Font Awesome v4 Compatibility" "Regular"
fa-solid-900.ttf: "Font Awesome 6 Free" "Solid"

This means that we should get sway working by:

bar {
    font pango:Hack, "Font Awesome 6 Free" 11
    ...
}

After restarting everything works correctly.