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.
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.
Then:
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!
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:
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) | gVim (Windows workaround) |
Brackets (with this plugin) | IDLE |
Chocolat | KDevelop 4 |
CLion (2016.2+, instructions) | Monkey Studio IDE |
Cloud9 (instructions) | UltraEdit |
Coda 2 | |
CodeLite | |
CodeRunner | |
CotEditor | |
Eclipse | |
elementary Code | |
Geany (1.37+) | |
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 | |
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 |
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
Projects using Fira CodeAlternativesFree monospaced fonts with ligatures: Paid monospaced fonts with ligatures: Building Fira Code locallyIn case you want to alter FiraCode.glyphs and build OTF/TTF/WOFF files yourself, this is the setup I use on macOS:
Alternatively, you can build Fira Code using Docker:
Credits
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