GitHub - tonsky/FiraCode: Monospaced font with programming ligatures

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

Being a programming font, Fira Code has fantastic support for ASCII/box drawing, powerline and other forms of console UIs.

Unicode coverage makes Fira Code a great choice for mathematical writing.

How does it look?

Editor compatibility list

Terminal compatibility list

Browser support

<!-- HTML -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/tonsky/FiraCode@4/distr/fira_code.css">

/* CSS */
@import url(https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/tonsky/FiraCode@4/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)
• 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

# 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