13 KiB
Fira Code: free 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
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.
Download & Install
Then:
Support
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!
What’s in the box?
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:
How does it look?
Editor compatibility list
| 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 |
Terminal compatibility list
| 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) |
Browser support
<!-- 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; }
}
- IE 10+, Edge Legacy: enable with
font-feature-settings: "calt"; - Firefox
- Safari
- Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Opera)
- ACE
- CodeMirror (enable with
font-variant-ligatures: contextual;)
Projects using Fira Code
Alternatives
Free monospaced fonts with ligatures:
Paid monospaced fonts with ligatures:
Building Fira Code locally
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
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