11 KiB
Fira Code: monospaced font with programming ligatures
Problem
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.
Solution
Download v.2 · How to install · Troubleshooting · News & updates
Fira Code is an extension of the Fira Mono font containing a set of 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.
Code examples
Ruby:
JavaScript:
PHP:
Erlang:
Elixir:
Go:
LiveScript:
Clojure:
Swift:
Stylistic sets:
See How to enable
Terminal support
| Works | Doesn’t work |
|---|---|
| Butterfly | Alacritty |
| crosh (ChromeOS, instructions) | Windows Console (conhost.exe) |
| Hyper.app | Cmder |
| iTerm 2 (3.1+) | ConEmu |
| Kitty | GNOME Terminal |
| Konsole | mate-terminal |
| mintty (partial support 2.8.3+) | PuTTY |
| QTerminal | rxvt |
| Terminal.app | xterm |
| Termux | ZOC (Windows) |
| Token2Shell/MD | gtkterm, guake, LXTerminal, sakura, Terminator, xfce4-terminal, and other libvte-based terminals (bug report) |
| upterm | |
| Windows Terminal | |
| ZOC (macOS) |
Editor support
| 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) | Eclipse (Win, vote here) |
| Atom 1.1 or newer (instructions) | Standalone Emacs (workaround) |
| BBEdit/TextWrangler (v. 11 only, instructions) | gVim (Windows workaround) |
| Brackets (with this plugin) | IDLE |
| Chocolat | KDevelop 4 |
| CLion (2016.2+, instructions) | Monkey Studio IDE |
| Cloud9 (instructions) | |
| Coda 2 | |
| CodeLite | |
| Eclipse (Mac 4.7+, Linux) | |
| elementary Code | |
| Geany | |
| gEdit / Pluma | |
| GNOME Builder | |
| GoormIDE (instructions) | |
| IntelliJ IDEA (2016.2+, instructions) | |
| Kate, KWrite | |
| KDevelop 5+ | |
| Komodo | |
| Leafpad | |
| LibreOffice | |
| LightTable (instructions) | |
| LINQPad | |
| MacVim 7.4 or newer (instructions) | |
| Mancy | |
| Meld | |
| Mousepad | |
| NeoVim-gtk | |
| NetBeans | |
| Notepad (Win) | |
| Notepad++ (with a workaround) | |
| PhpStorm (2016.2+, instructions) | |
| PyCharm (2016.2+, instructions) | |
| QtCreator | |
| Rider | |
| RStudio (instructions) | |
| RubyMine (2016.2+, instructions) | |
| Scratch | |
| Scribus (1.5.3+) | |
| SublimeText (3146+) | |
| Spyder IDE (only with Qt5) | |
| SuperCollider 3 | |
| TextAdept (Linux, Mac) | |
| 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) | |
| Probably work: Smultron, Vico | Under question: Code::Blocks IDE |
Browser support
<!-- HTML -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/tonsky/FiraCode@1.207/distr/fira_code.css">
/* CSS */
@import url(https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/tonsky/FiraCode@1.207/distr/fira_code.css);
/* Specify in CSS */
font-family: 'Fira Code', monospace;
- IE 10+, Edge: enable with
font-feature-settings: "calt" 1; - Firefox
- Safari
- Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Opera)
- ACE
- CodeMirror (enable with
font-variant-ligatures: contextual;)
Projects using Fira Code
- All JetBrains products
- CodePen
- Blink Shell
- Klipse
- IlyaBirman.net
- EvilMartians.com
- Web Maker
- FromScratch
- PEP20.org
Alternatives
Other monospaced fonts with ligatures:
- Hasklig (free)
- PragmataPro (€59)
- Monoid (free)
- Fixedsys Excelsior (free)
- Iosevka (free)
- DejaVu Sans Code (free)
- Victor Mono (free)
Building Fira Code locally
In case you want to alter FiraCode.glyphs and build OTF/TTF/WOFF files yourself, this is setup I use on macOS:
# install all required build tools
./script/bootstrap
# build the font files
./script/build
# install OTFs to ~/Library/Fonts
./script/install
Credits
- Author: Nikita Prokopov @nikitonsky
- Based on: Fira Mono
- Inspired by: Hasklig
Which font?
TL;DR
- Pick your font family and then select from the
'complete'directory.- If you are on Windows pick a font with the
'Windows Compatible'suffix.- This includes specific tweaks to ensure the font works on Windows, in particular monospace identification and font name length limitations
- If you are limited to monospaced fonts (because of your terminal, etc) then pick a font with the
'Mono'suffix.- This denotes that the Nerd Font glyphs will be monospaced not necessarily that the entire font will be monospaced
- If you are on Windows pick a font with the
Ligatures
By the Nerd Font policy, the variant with the 'Mono' suffix is not supposed to have any ligatures.
Use the non-Mono variants to have ligatures.
Explanation
Once you narrow down your font choice of family (Droid Sans, Inconsolata, etc) and style (bold, italic, etc) you have 2 main choices:
Option 1: Download already patched font
- download an already patched font from the
completefolder- This is most likely the one you want. It includes all of the glyphs from all of the glyph sets. Only caution here is that some fonts have glyphs in the same code point so to include everything some had to be moved to alternate code points.
Option 2: Patch your own font
- patch your own variations with the various options provided by the font patcher (see each font's readme for full list of combinations available)
- This is the option you want if the font you use is not already included or you want maximum control of what's included
- This contains a list of all permutations of the various glyphs. E.g. You want the font with only Octicons or you want the font with just Font Awesome and Devicons. The goal is to provide every combination possible in this folder.
For more information see: The FAQ
Variations (Combinations)
The combinations and total number of combinations are provided here for reference if you want to create your own variation of a patched Nerd Font.
Why aren't all variations included ?
Combinations are no longer included by default because of the large inflation in size it caused the Repository and the amount of time it takes to rebuild all of the combinations. This issue would exponentially get worse as the numbers of Fonts and Glyph Sets provided increase.