Programmers use a lot of symbols, often encoded with several characters. For the human brain, sequences like ->, <= or := are single logical tokens, even if they take two or three characters on the screen. Your eye spends a non-zero amount of energy to scan, parse and join multiple characters into a single logical one. Ideally, all programming languages should be designed with full-fledged Unicode symbols for operators, but that’s not the case yet.
Fira Code is a free monospaced font containing ligatures for common programming multi-character combinations. This is just a font rendering feature: underlying code remains ASCII-compatible. This helps to read and understand code faster. For some frequent sequences like .. or //, ligatures allow us to correct spacing.
Then:
Fira Code is a personal, free-time project with no funding and a huge feature request backlog. If you love it, consider supporting its development via GitHub Sponsors or Patreon. Any help counts!
Left: ligatures as rendered in Fira Code. Right: same character sequences without ligatures.
Fira Code comes with a huge variety of arrows. Even better: you can make them as long as you like and combine start/middle/end fragments however you want!
Fira Code is not only about ligatures. Some fine-tuning is done for punctuation and frequent letter pairs.
Fira Code comes with a few different character variants, so that everyone can choose what’s best for them. How to enable
Some ligatures can be altered or enabled using stylistic sets/character variants:
Being a programming font, Fira Code has fantastic support for ASCII/box drawing, powerline and other forms of console UIs:
Fira Code is the first programming font to offer dedicated glyphs to render progress bars:
In action:
We hope more programming fonts will adopt this convention and ship their own versions.
Unicode coverage makes Fira Code a great choice for mathematical writing:
| Works | Doesn’t work |
|---|---|
| Abricotine | Arduino IDE |
| Android Studio (2.3+, instructions) | Adobe Dreamweaver |
| Anjuta (unless at the EOF) | Delphi IDE |
| AppCode (2016.2+, instructions) | Standalone Emacs (workaround) |
| Atom 1.1 or newer (instructions) | Godot (issue) |
| BBEdit/TextWrangler (v. 11 only, instructions) | IDLE |
| Brackets (with this plugin) | KDevelop 4 |
| Chocolat | Monkey Studio IDE |
| CLion (2016.2+, instructions) | UltraEdit |
| Cloud9 (instructions) | |
| Coda 2 | |
| CodeLite | |
| CodeRunner | |
| CotEditor | |
| Eclipse | |
| elementary Code | |
| Geany (1.37+) | |
| gEdit / Pluma | |
| GNOME Builder | |
| GoormIDE (instructions) | |
| gVim (Windows, GTK) | |
| IntelliJ IDEA (2016.2+, instructions) | |
| Kate, KWrite | |
| KDevelop 5+ | |
| Komodo | |
| Leafpad | |
| LibreOffice | |
| LightTable (instructions) | |
| LINQPad | |
| MacVim 7.4 or newer (instructions) | |
| Mancy | |
| MATLAB (instructions) | |
| Meld | |
| Mousepad | |
| NeoVim-gtk | |
| NetBeans | |
| Notepad (Windows) | |
| Notepad++ (with a workaround) | |
| Notepad3 (instructions) | |
| Nova | |
| PhpStorm (2016.2+, instructions) | |
| PyCharm (2016.2+, instructions) | |
| QOwnNotes (21.16.6+) | |
| QtCreator | |
| Rider | |
| RStudio (instructions) | |
| RubyMine (2016.2+, instructions) | |
| Scratch | |
| Scribus (1.5.3+) | |
| SublimeText (3146+) | |
| Spyder IDE (only with Qt5) | |
| SuperCollider 3 | |
| TextAdept (Linux, macOS) | |
| TextEdit | |
| TextMate 2 | |
| VimR (instructions) | |
| Visual Studio (2015+, instructions) | |
| Visual Studio Code (instructions) | |
| WebStorm (2016.2+, instructions) | |
| Xamarin Studio/Monodevelop | |
| Xcode (8.0+, otherwise with plugin) | |
| Xi | |
| Probably work: Smultron, Vico | Under question: Code::Blocks IDE |
| Platform | Works | Doesn’t work |
|---|---|---|
| macOS | Hyper (see #3607) iTerm 2 Kitty Terminal.app ZOC | Alacritty |
| Windows | Hyper (see #3607) Mintty Token2Shell Windows Terminal | Alacritty Cmder ConEmu PuTTY Windows Console ZOC |
| Linux | Hyper (see #3607) Kitty Konsole QTerminal Termux st (patch) | Alacritty GNOME Terminal libvte-based terminals (bug report):
rxvt terminology xterm |
| ChromeOS | crosh (instructions) |
<!-- HTML -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/firacode@6.2.0/distr/fira_code.css">
/* CSS */
@import url(https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/firacode@6.2.0/distr/fira_code.css);
/* Specify in CSS */
code { font-family: 'Fira Code', monospace; }
@supports (font-variation-settings: normal) {
code { font-family: 'Fira Code VF', monospace; }
}
font-feature-settings: "calt";font-variant-ligatures: contextual;)Free monospaced fonts with ligatures:
Paid monospaced fonts with ligatures:
In case you want to alter FiraCode.glyphs and build OTF/TTF/WOFF files yourself, this is the setup I use on macOS:
# install all required build tools
./script/bootstrap_macos.sh
# build the font files
./script/build.sh
# install OTFs to ~/Library/Fonts
cp distr/otf/*.otf ~/Library/Fonts
Alternatively, you can build Fira Code using Docker:
# install dependencies in a container and build the font files
make
# package the font files from dist/ into a zip
make package
FAQs
Fira Code: monospaced font with programming ligatures
The npm package firacode receives a total of 3,379 weekly downloads. As such, firacode popularity was classified as popular.
We found that firacode demonstrated a not healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released a year ago. It has 2 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
Did you know?
Socket for GitHub automatically highlights issues in each pull request and monitors the health of all your open source dependencies. Discover the contents of your packages and block harmful activity before you install or update your dependencies.
Security News
TC39 met in Seattle and advanced 9 JavaScript proposals, including three to Stage 4, introducing new features and enhancements for a future ECMAScript release.
Security News
Deno 2.2 enhances Node.js compatibility, improves dependency management, adds OpenTelemetry support, and expands linting and task automation for developers.
Security News
React's CRA deprecation announcement sparked community criticism over framework recommendations, leading to quick updates acknowledging build tools like Vite as valid alternatives.