How can I use Font Awesome (or other font icons) instead of the jQuery sprites in Primefaces DataTable?

Question

I'm using PrimeFaces to generate a datatable. The default sorting icons are chevrons from the JQuery library but as they are not Vector they look ugly. I wan't to replace them using some font like font awesome but I have no clue how to do this. The below CSS handles I can use to change the image to different sprites etc.

If I could somehow change the class primefaces adds from ui-icon-triangle-1-n to af fa-sort-alpha-desc for example I would already be helped.

.ui-state-default .ui-icon{
        background-image: url("../Assets/images/jquery-ui/ui-    icons_0072b6_256x240.png");
    }
    .ui-datatable .ui-icon-carat-2-n-s {
    background-position: -160px 0 !important;
}

.ui-datatable .ui-icon-triangle-1-n{
    background-position: 0 -48px !important;
}

.ui-datatable .ui-icon-triangle-1-s{
    background-position: -64px -48px !important;
}

Answer 1

I ended up with this bit of CSS for the DataTable:

.ui-datatable .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon {
    background-image: none; text-indent: 0; margin: 0 0 0 .5em;
}
.ui-paginator > span:before, .ui-sortable-column-icon:before {
    font-family: FontAwesome; color: #fff;
}
.ui-paginator > span > span, .ui-paginator a span { display: none; }
.ui-paginator-first:before { content: '\f049'; }
.ui-paginator-prev:before { content: '\f048'; }
.ui-paginator-next:before { content: '\f051'; }
.ui-paginator-last:before { content: '\f050'; }
.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s:before { content: '\f0dc'; }
.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s.ui-icon-triangle-1-n:before { content: '\f0de'; }
.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s.ui-icon-triangle-1-s:before { content: '\f0dd'; }
.ui-paginator .ui-state-disabled { opacity: .25; }

All the unicodes can be found here: http://fontawesome.io/cheatsheet/

Font Awesome offers some alternative icons:

•  fa-sort-alpha-asc \f15d
•  fa-sort-alpha-desc \f15e
•  fa-sort-amount-asc \f160
•  fa-sort-amount-desc \f161
•  fa-sort-numeric-asc \f162
•  fa-sort-numeric-desc \f163

Update

After doing some CSS overriding for my theme and taking Kukeltje's comment into consideration I decided I would be a good idea to add a JSF ResourceHandler to the theme I'm working on.

Simply add the dependency to your project and add the resource handler

<application>
    <resource-handler>org.jepsar.primefaces.theme.jepsar.FontAwesomeResourceHandler</resource-handler>
</application>

The handler will detect PrimeFaces themes and will patch the CSS. It removes the jQuery UI icons and adds Font Awesome rules (which includes a separate icon mapping SCSS).

Answer 2

here is an example:

.ui-paginator-first.ui-state-default.ui-corner-all:before{
    content: "\f049";
    font-family: FontAwesome;
    color: white;
}

you can find the codes you cann add for content instead of "\f049" in the font-awesome website http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/pencil/

the :before is important behind the css class