Manage Fonts Faster with fnt CLI
Keeping dashboards, runbooks, and status pages on-brand is hard when every environment ships a different font selection or depends on third-party CDNs. fnt closes that gap with a lightweight font manager tailored to Linux and macOS operators.
What Is fnt?
fnt is an open-source command-line tool that mirrors Debian sid and Google Fonts repositories into a single, searchable catalog. It installs on macOS and most Linux distributions, exposing a consistent interface for updating indexes, installing fonts, and previewing results in your terminal. By keeping font assets local, teams can harden privacy, reduce latency, and guarantee identical typography across staging and production.
Key Features
- Unified catalog of ~500 Debian
fonts-*packages and ~1,900 Google fonts with predictable naming. - Terminal-friendly previews rendered via chafa so you can assess glyph coverage without leaving the shell.
- One-step commands—
fnt update,fnt search,fnt install, andfnt list—cover the entire lifecycle from discovery to deployment. - Broad packaging support including
make install, Debian backports, and multiple community repositories tracked on Repology. - Privacy-aware workflow that keeps fonts on your hosts, avoiding remote Google Fonts lookups that leak user metadata.
Installation
Clone the project and build from source for the most recent release:
git clone https://github.com/alexmyczko/fnt.git
cd fnt
make install
On Debian stable, enable the backports repo and install the packaged build:
sudo apt update
sudo apt -t bullseye-backports install fnt
For other platforms, consult the Repology matrix to pick the package feed that matches your distribution.
Usage
Refresh the cache, locate a font, preview it, and add it to your system—all from the terminal:
fnt update
fnt search agave
fnt preview agave
fnt install agave
fnt list
The preview command streams ASCII-art glyphs, letting you confirm legibility in the same environment that renders your dashboards.
Operational Tips
Automate discovery sessions with a rotating preview: while (clear); do fnt preview $(fnt search | shuf -n1); sleep 10; done. It is a quick way to vet options for branding refreshes.
Need to stay DFSG-compliant? Filter out Google-hosted fonts before bulk installs with fnt search | grep -v "^google-". Pipe the results into fnt install to mirror only Debian-packaged assets when building air-gapped AMIs.
Enable Zsh completions by adding autoload -U compinit and compinit to your shell profile so subcommands and font names tab-complete like any other ops tool.
Conclusion
fnt gives reliability teams a repeatable path to curate and ship fonts without manual downloads or CDN dependencies. Whether you are standardizing observability UIs or preparing disaster-recovery workstations, its searchable catalog and preview flow keep typography predictable. Explore the project on GitHub and bring font management into your automation pipeline.
Reduce firefighting with Akmatori, the AI-powered SRE co-pilot that streamlines incident response and keeps on-call calm.
Build on reliable infrastructure with Gcore, offering high-performance virtual machines and bare metal across the globe.