TL;DR

I created VimDevIcons, which spawned Nerd Fonts. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Short story

I'm a developer, wanted to get into OSS and Vim. Loved Vim. Made a Vim plugin, people used it. Made font with bunch 'o glyphs a separate project (Nerd Fonts). Down the rabbit hole ... 😄

Long story

I really do love working on OSS projects. It is a freeing and rewarding experience in my personal experience.

Most of my OSS journey started like most devs, use some tool and find issues or have ideas for improvements and submit Pull Requests. I at some point took up the idea to learn Vim because modal editing seemed to make a lot of sense! Along the way I saw various editors having nice icons in their file explorers and at this point I was really loving Vim and didn't want to switch off. Well Vim is all text based (there is no GUI to do crazy things) so I found fonts that had glyphs (icons) for file types. Cool so that is what I wanted.

Eventually my insatiable appetite for the glyphs available could not be satisfied as I struggled to find a clear be-all end-all collection of glyphs in a single font. I got my head into FontForge so that I could pull in various icons from various icon sets into my own custom font. Eventually I made the Vim tweaks I had into a somewhat "proper" plugin and posted it on GitHub. There was some interest and a very limiting single font you had to use.

It was obvious that well... people are going to want to use their favorite fonts. It was suggested to automate the process so that one could "patch" any font they wanted with the glyphs. Thus Nerd Fonts was born. I really didn't expect much to come from that.