So, I faced a problem while creating Defuse Divison, which was getting unicode symbols to display in my terminal. Specifically, I wanted the unicode Bomb character (💣 ) to display properly.
To make this work, I initially extended my font configuration in .Xresources,
adding a line to allow for Symbola as a fallback font for urxvt:
urxvt*font:xft:Inconsolata:size=10,xft:Symbola:size=10
! └──────────────────┘
! I added this part
However, when I printed a bomb character, I was still seeing tofus (as in,
little rectangles that look like blocks of tofu). I’d heard that this was a
problem with the size of various symbols in fonts being larger than the single
“box” that they’re supposed to take. So I tried just shrinking the font of
Symbola so these custom symbols would display inside a single “box”, and what
do you know, it worked! So now that line of my .Xresources is this:
urxvt*font:xft:Inconsolata:size=10,xft:Symbola:size=6
Hope this helps you get the fancy fonts you want in your terminal!