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I am looking for a cross platform way to check if I am using a terminal emulator (with support for unicode characters) or a TTY session (with only support for ASCII chars). I initially tried to use if [[ $(tty) =~ /dev/tty ]]. This worked well on Linux; I was able to distinguish between the TTY session and a terminal emulator. The issue arises with Mac. All Mac terminal emulators return /dev/tty... from the tty command. I then saw suggestions to use $WINDOWID, $DISPLAY and $TERM_PROGRAM. The issue then becomes that not all terminal emulators set these variables.

So my question is this: Is there a surefire way to reliably tell if you are using a terminal emulator or a TTY session? I know that i could theoretically create an if statement that checks for all of those but I am not a big fan of doing that. Is there a cleaner way to do this?

(This is for importing my prompt to use Nerd fonts or not)

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  • Given that the need comes from compatibility with your local Nerd fonts configuration, is a generic check actually necessary? Suppose you use Konsole and iTerm2 and have configured them to use Nerd fonts – find a way to check for Konsole and iTerm2 and only activate the fonts in those?
    – grawity
    Commented Oct 17, 2024 at 8:15
  • The distinction you draw is wrong, I think – there's no guarantee a terminal emulator supports unicode, and there's no guarantee a physical TTY (I'd be interested to see one) would not. I think what you actually want to know is "Does my terminal support UTF?" (and you don't really care about what kind of terminal that is). Am I interpreting you correctly?
    – Marcus Müller
    Commented Oct 17, 2024 at 13:25

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