firacode
v6.2.0
Published
Fira Code: monospaced font with programming ligatures
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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
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 2KittyTerminal.appZOC | Alacritty | | Windows | Hyper (see #3607)MinttyToken2ShellWindows Terminal | AlacrittyCmderConEmuPuTTYWindows ConsoleZOC | | Linux | Hyper (see #3607)KittyKonsoleQTerminalTermuxst (patch) | AlacrittyGNOME Terminallibvte-based terminals (bug report): gtktermguakeLXTerminal sakuraTerminatorxfce4-terminalmate-terminalrxvtterminologyxterm | ChromeOS | crosh (instructions) | |
Browser support
<!-- HTML -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/distr/fira_code.css">
/* CSS */
@import url(https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/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