ChromeOS hterm: customize fonts

26 Jan, 2022 • 337 words • 2 min • updated 25 Dec, 2025

⚠️ This post is over one year old. It may no longer be up to date or relevant. Opinions may have changed.

ChromeOS hterm (“Secure Shell extension”) is one of my favorite chrome extensions. It is a bit dull with its out-of-the-box monospace font though. In this post we’ll learn how to customize it.

Google Fonts #

The easiest way to customize the Secure Shell extension to use a custom font is to select one from Google Fonts. Once you select a font from there, it will give you information like this:

     text
     
   
Use on the web
To embed a font, copy the code into the <head> of your html
( ) <link> (x) @import

<style>
@import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=IBM+Plex+Sans&display=swap');
</style>

font-family: 'IBM Plex Sans', sans-serif;

All we have to do is to copy the URL within the url('...') fragment above, go to the settings of the Secure Shell extension, and then paste it there:

     text
     
   
# Example 1: IBM Plex Sans
Custom CSS (URI): https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=IBM+Plex+Sans&display=swap

# Example 2: Fira Code
Custom CSS (URI): https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Fira+Code:wght@400;700&display=swap

# Example 3: Combine both
https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Fira+Code:wght@400;700&family=IBM+Plex+Sans&display=swap

And then set the extension to use it:

text

Text font family: "IBM Plex Sans", "Fira Code", monospace

From Secure Shell FAQ:

By default, we disable ligatures. Some fonts actively enable them like macOS’s Menlo (e.g. “ae” is rendered as “æ”). This messes up copying and pasting and is, arguably, not terribly legible for a terminal.

If your font supports ligatures, consider enabling them:

     text
     
   
Custom CSS (inline text):

* {
    -webkit-font-feature-settings: "liga" on, "calt" on;
    -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
    text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
}

Not all fonts are available on Google Fonts though. For example, Hermit is one of my current monospace favorites: it’s not there¹.

Github #

Many fonts are available on GitHub (or in other forges), checked into a git repository.

If you happen to find a .woff2 web font file laying therein, you could also use it in hterm:

     text
     
   
Custom CSS (inline text):

@font-face {
  font-family: "Anonymous Pro";
  src: url(https://cdn.rawgit.com/wernight/powerline-web-fonts/8040cf32c146c7cd4f776c1484d23dc40685c1bc/fonts/AnonymousPro.woff2);
}

And then set the extension to use it:

text

Text font family: "Anonymous Pro", monospace

Note: I couldn’t get this method to work with .ttf or .otf.

https://github.com/pcaro90/hermit/issues/2 ↩︎