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submitted 1 day ago by Dirk@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

So, yeah, basically the title …

I am in search for a good and simple and modern font viewing application. But there seems to be nothing that matches my criteria.

  • The software needs to be independent from any desktop environment, because I don’;t use one and i am not willing to install what feels like hundreds of specific dependencies

  • The software also should not be a font manager, I can manage my fonts absolutely fine by my own.

  • The software also does not need any features to view “installed and uninstalled” fonts (a term I come across – whatever that means), just give it a file name as parameter and view that font in the GUI.

  • The software should not be dead (i.e. last upstream change over a decade ago, using a dead graphics toolkit, not working on Wayland, etc.).

But either I forgot how to search the web or there seems to be no such application. All I wound was either decades old, dead software, or overly complicated and complex font managers or modules for the two common desktop environments.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks in advance :)

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[-] Dirk@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago

Ideally something that allows me to see the characters in a table, sorted by character blocks, like in the LibreOffice “Insert Special Characters” dialog, so that I’m not limited to some predefined text but being able to see all characters.

[-] olenkoVD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago
[-] Dirk@lemmy.ml 2 points 21 hours ago

KCharSelect

It just installs kcharselect … and figuratively half of KDE :)

There seems to be a Flatpak available I’ll check out later when I have time to install hundreds of megabyte of depending other KDE-specific Flatpaks …

[-] nyan@sh.itjust.works 1 points 12 hours ago

The TDE version of kcharselect should do much the same stuff with fewer deps, if a suitable package exists for your distro.

[-] Dirk@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 hours ago

Mmmh, nope, only the normal version available.

The Flatpak version (or KCharSelect in general) unfortunately ignores the font file given on command line.

[-] excel@lemming.megumin.org 3 points 20 hours ago

Sounds like you already know the real solution: use KDE

this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
18 points (75.0% liked)

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