The guide explains how to add patched “Nerd Fonts” to a Manjaro 21 system by using the AUR helper yay. After updating the system and installing the base‑development tools, you clone and build yay itself, then install any nerd‑fonts‑<family> package (or the meta‑package nerd‑fonts‑complete) from the AUR. Once the font files are placed under /usr/share/fonts/nerd‑fonts, you refresh the font cache with fc-cache -fv and select the new “<Family> Nerd Font” in your terminal emulator, editor, or status bar configuration. The result is a fully functional setup where icons such as Git, Docker, and Powerline symbols appear correctly instead of blank squares.

How to Install Nerd Fonts on Manjaro 21 Linux with yay

You’ll get a quick walk‑through of pulling Nerd Fonts from the AUR and wiring them into your desktop. By the end you’ll be able to open a terminal or editor and actually see those sweet patched icons instead of blank squares.

1. What you need first

• A working Manjaro 21 installation (any edition works).
• An AUR helper – we’ll use yay because it’s already in the official repos and handles dependencies nicely.

I ran into this problem after a fresh i3‑wm setup: my status bar showed “?” everywhere I expected a Git or Docker icon. The fix was simply a proper Nerd Font, but the default package manager didn’t have any of them.

2. Install yay if it isn’t already

Open a terminal and type:

sudo pacman -Syu # bring the system up to date
sudo pacman -S base-devel git # required for building AUR packages
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
cd yay
makepkg -si

base-devel supplies the compiler tools needed to build anything from the AUR. yay will let us fetch and compile Nerd Font packages with a single command.

3. Choose a Nerd Font variant

The AUR contains dozens of individual font packages, each named like nerd-fonts‑<family> (e.g., nerd-fonts-hack, nerd-fonts-fira-code). Pick one that matches the programming font you already use, or grab the whole collection if disk space isn’t a concern.

yay -S nerd-fonts-hack # replace “hack” with your favorite

During the build yay will ask whether to edit the PKGBUILD; just hit Enter unless you have a reason to tweak it. The script pulls the upstream zip, extracts only the needed TTF files and installs them under /usr/share/fonts/nerd-fonts.

4. Refresh the font cache

After installation the system still needs to index the new glyphs:

fc-cache -fv

Running -v prints each directory it scans – handy for confirming that the Nerd Font files were actually added.

5. Tell your apps to use the Nerd Font

• Terminal – In your terminal emulator’s preferences set the font family to “Hack Nerd Font” (or whatever you installed).
• Editor / IDE – Most editors let you pick a font by name; just type the exact family string.
• Status bars & prompts – If you’re using something like polybar, i3status or Powerline, change the font-0 line to the Nerd Font name.

A quick sanity check: open a new terminal window and run printf "\uF120\n"; you should see the Git icon instead of an empty box.

6. Optional: install the whole bundle

If you’re tired of picking one by one, the meta‑package nerd-fonts-complete pulls every patched font:

yay -S nerd-fonts-complete

It adds a couple hundred megabytes to your /usr/share/fonts, but you’ll never have to think about “which Nerd Font?” again.

That’s all there is to it. Your system now speaks the language of icons, and you won’t be stuck with those mysterious placeholder squares any longer.