This has been a giant mess but I have a solution now.
Primary font: Bitstream Vera
Primary monospace font: Hack
Then I have Nerd Font Symbols (2048 em non-mono) for powerline,
fontawesome, etc glyphs. Non-mono because mono shrinks the glyphs
vertically an unreasonable amount. Same reason I'm not using the
nerd-font patched ttf-hack.
I have to use Hack over Bitstream Vera Sans mono because Bitstream
specifies a few glyphs used in powerline and they're not shaped right,
for example the triangular ends of banners. Hack fixes this.
Then there's the complete Google Noto set. Noto is "Everything" when
installed with the noto-fonts, CJK, and Emoji. You have to explicitly
declare wanting the color emoji or you get the black and white stuff.
Noto provides a few misc glyphs that Hack and Nerd Font Symbols both
don't, like heavy check and heavy ballot x which are used in my shell
prompt.
With noto-fonts installed and my userland fontconfig using prepends for
the fonts I want, the entire giant Noto set falls in as a fallback
behind it all without needing to be defined.
This sucked to suss out; trying to avoid Google stuff made it 100x more
complicated and I just kind of gave up.
We set up a fonts.conf to specify Bitstream Vera for all my font
preferences with a fallback to the Noto Color Emoji. This should
standardize font/emoji support and my method falls back to system
fontconfig if these aren't font.
Then we swap alacritty and sway to monospace.
