Every so often I find a new font that I want to use for something on my system.

This time it was a new programming font in gvim. The font I was interested in is ProFontI use this font at work, and it is far superior to the default terminal font.

But ever time I go to install a new font, I need to look up how. It’s one of those things that I don’t do often enough for it to be worth remembering I guess.

So here it is, for my reference… Ok, you can read it too I suppose.

This applies to truetype fonts but, as far as I am aware, the process should be similar, if not the same, for other font types.

The first step is to obtain the font files and place them into one of your system font folders.

Your font folders can be found by:

grep FontPath /etc/X11/xorg.conf


I decided to use /usr/share/fonts/truetype/custom/ so after copying the .ttf file(s) into there.

sudo cp newfont.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/custom/


It was a simple matter of running:

sudo fc-cache -f

to update the fonts and they were available to use where I wanted them (in Vim).