font-FiraCode

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:

• How to Install
• Troubleshooting
• News & Updates

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
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

• All JetBrains products
• CodePen
• Blink Shell
• Klipse
• IlyaBirman.net
• EvilMartians.com
• Web Maker
• FromScratch
• PEP20.org

Alternatives

Free monospaced fonts with ligatures:

• Hasklig
• Monoid
• Fixedsys Excelsior
• Iosevka
• DejaVu Sans Code
• Victor Mono
• Cascadia Code
• JetBrains Mono

Paid monospaced fonts with ligatures:

• PragmataPro
• Mono Lisa

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