Most apps treat readability as a theme: light, dark, done. Hermes Desktop goes one level deeper. Its typography controls can change the size of the whole interface and swap the chat and terminal faces independently, which makes it genuinely useful when your eyes are tired, your monitor is too far away, or ordinary UI text starts blurring together.

The pointer came from a short post by @witcheer: open Settings, find Typography, and stop accepting the default font as fate. The 25-second version is below; the slightly longer version is worth doing once because these settings live per profile, and getting them right makes every later Hermes session calmer.

Start with scale, not the font menu

The fastest win is UI Scale. In Hermes Desktop, go to Settings > Appearance > Typography, or press Cmd+K on macOS and Ctrl+K on Windows or Linux, then type font. UI Scale runs from 90% to 175% and resizes text and controls across the whole app. The keyboard route works too: Cmd/Ctrl with +, - and 0 zooms in, out, and back to normal.

I'd set size before falling in love with a typeface. A great readability font at 90% can still feel cramped, while an ordinary font at 110% or 125% can suddenly feel like a different app. Pick the scale where buttons, sidebars, and chat all look comfortable, then change the letterforms.

Two fonts, two jobs: chat and terminal

Hermes Desktop keeps Chat Font and Terminal Font separate. That split matters because chat needs comfortable reading and the terminal needs unambiguous glyphs and icons. The desktop fonts documentation stores both per profile in config.yaml: Chat Font is desktop.font_family, Terminal Font is terminal.font_family.

For chat and the rest of the UI, type the name of any font installed on your machine. This is where accessibility faces such as OpenDyslexic or Atkinson Hyperlegible come in; they work once they are installed at the OS level. If a character is missing from your pick, Hermes keeps the active theme's font stack behind it so the glyph still renders. Leaving the field blank means "use the theme font," which is the safe default.

For the embedded terminal, choose a Nerd Font if you want shell icons and Powerline-style separators to render properly. Leaving Terminal Font blank falls back to the bundled JetBrains Mono. So the practical recipe is simple: install the fonts first, type the exact family name into the right box, then glance at both a long chat answer and terminal output before calling it done.

If it looks wrong, reset this way

Font experiments can go sideways fast: too large, too condensed, wrong terminal icons, or a family name with a typo. Hermes gives you a clean exit. Select Use theme font and return UI Scale to 100%. That restores the default look without forcing you to remember what you changed.

One caution is worth stating plainly. These are per-profile settings, so a fix in one Hermes profile does not automatically repair another. If Hermes still looks odd after a reset, check that you edited the profile you are actually using. And if icons turn into boxes in the terminal, that is usually not a Hermes bug; it means the selected terminal font lacks Nerd Font glyphs.

None of this is flashy, which is why I like it. An agent you stare at all day should let you tune the text first and show off later. Set the scale, give chat a humane face, give the terminal a font that respects icons, and keep the reset path in your back pocket.