Feature Request: Native Nerd Fonts support for Statusline and Filemanager

[brunohcorreia]

Currently, Micro feels visually "plain" compared to other modern terminal editors (like Helix or Neovim configurations) when it comes to file identification. I would like to request native support for Nerd Fonts icons within Micro core and its default plugins. This would greatly improve visual navigation and UI aesthetics.

Implementation suggestions:

1. Statusline: Display the file type icon next to the filename or filetype indicator.
2. Filemanager: Display folder icons (open/closed) and file type icons next to items in the tree view.
3. Configuration: Introduce a global option (e.g., nerdfonts) to control this.

Crucially, this option should be false (disabled)by default. This ensures that Micro remains lightweight and compatible with standard terminals/fonts out of the box. Only users with patched fonts who explicitly want this feature would enable it (e.g., set nerdfonts true).

[Andriamanitra]

I think the best way to experiment with this would be to implement it as a plugin. The status line is entirely customizable and the whole file manager is a 3rd party plugin, so there's nothing you need from micro's side to implement the suggestions. Check out the built-in status plugin if you need help getting started.

If the feature gains popularity as a plugin it would be a good sign that this feature is something users want.

[Neko-Box-Coder]

Whether it should be built-in or not is another question, but there are existing plugins that already do this, for anyone interseted:

https://github.com/Neko-Box-Coder/filemanager2
https://github.com/Neko-Box-Coder/git-status

[JoeKar]

https://github.com/Neko-Box-Coder/filemanager2

Cool to see. I currently plan to extract all the plugins bundled in micro-editor/updated-plugins into their own repositories within the organization¹².
This makes it easier to release single plugins, when the responsible channel.json is updated once to point to the new repo.json location.

Then we can "upstream" your improvements from filemanager2.

But we definitely need someone who is responsible for the plugin management. It is currently just too much to take care of.

Besides of that, do we need this feature request to stay open?

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/micro-editor/updated-plugins/pull/27#pullrequestreview-3647594052 ↩

2. https://github.com/micro-editor/updated-plugins/pull/27#issuecomment-3819715357 ↩