Fonts: introduce profiles: code, web, office, gui, ...

[landure]

Many fonts are specialized, and one size doesn't fit all.

For example, in IDE, many use fonts such as Fira Code.
For reading or web, Atkinson Hyperlegible (or Luciole) are nice to ease eye strain.
For gui elements (GNOME, KDE), other fonts are a better match.
The monospace font for console can not be the same as the one for web.
etc.

Why not introduce a fonts.profiles option with a selection of profiles that allow to personalize all app in a given profile :

• chrome, firefox, arc, librewolf, koreader, ... for web
• vscode , zed , cursor, ... for dev
• ...

The aim is for stylix to adjust font types an size according to the app profile.

[trueNAHO]

How would this differ from adding more stylix.fonts.${font} fonts? As mentioned in #801 (comment), we might not want this to prevent the general interface from becoming too opinionated.

[landure]

Yes , each profile would build upon existing fonts.monospace, fonts.serif, fonts.emoji and fonts.sansSerif.

There would be for example :

stylix.fonts.profiles.web = {
  sansSerif = {
          package = pkgs.atkinson-hyperlegible-next;
          name = "Atkinson Hyperlegible Next";
  };

  serif = config.stylix.fonts.serif
  monospace = config.stylix.fonts.monospace
  emoji = config.stylix.fonts.emoji
};

Then, firefox, qutebrowser, chromium, ... settings would default to config.fonts.profiles.web fonts.
This change is compatible with existing configurations.

The only difficulties are time to implement, and choosing the profiles supported by stylix.
Users stay free to customize fonts app per app.

[trueNAHO]

This would cause inherent inconsistencies between explicitly categorized applications and those generally supported through GUI frameworks (GTK and Qt) or terminal theming, requiring every application to be explicitly categorized. For example, a browser that is properly themed by Stylix despite not being explicitly supported would fall back to the stylix.fonts.<emoji|monospace|sansSerif|serif> font instead of the "correct" stylix.fonts.profiles.web font.

This proposal assumes the established categories are "correct" and unambiguous, which is subjective, context-dependant, and therefore impossible.

IMHO, requiring every application to be explicitly supported is not worth it and end-users should implement their own categorizations using the general Stylix interface.

For reference, modules that have already migrated to our custom module system already allow externally overriding application-specific fonts with the stylix.targets.${target}.fonts.override option.

[landure]

I see your point on categories being subjective. Thank you.