that’s just the $5 kites with more steps

Pull out your closest volume of Lord of the Rings and take a look. My copy at least has single-quotes for the speech text and double-quotes are used for nested speech. I guess it might be up to the publisher (eg: my copy of Harry Potter has been “Americanized” and thus uses double-quotes for the first level of speech text), but every copy of LotR i’ve run across uses single-quotes.

I use FiraCode Nerd Font Mono instead, but it also does not have a specific italic font. In my config, only the “normal” section is defined, but all my bold and/or italic text looks like it should. Apparently, alacritty will apply a heavier weight or slant to the “normal” type face if you simply omit the “bold” or “italic” sections. So, what you have right now should Just Work.

Allegedly, you can omit the “style” specification in the “italic” section (ie: just add "italic": {"family": "FiraMono Nerd Font"}, to your config snippit above), but i haven’t actually tried doing it that way.

Due to some poorly placed quotes, I managed to create a subdirectory named ~ in my home folder. You can imagine what happened next. Luckily, I had just gotten my backup system up and running the day before, so nothing was lost.