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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

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) Geany (Windows)
BBEdit/TextWrangler (v. 11 only, instructions) Godot (issue)
Brackets (with this plugin) gVim (Windows workaround)
Chocolat IDLE
CLion (2016.2+, instructions) KDevelop 4
Cloud9 (instructions) MATLAB
Coda 2 Monkey Studio IDE
CodeLite UltraEdit
CotEditor
Eclipse
elementary Code
Geany (macOS)
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 (Windows)
Notepad++ (with a workaround)
Notepad3 (instructions)
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, 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

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)
st (patch)

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)
  • 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

# build the font files
./script/build

# install OTFs to ~/Library/Fonts
./script/install

Credits