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
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.
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