Fira Code: monospaced font with programming ligatures

Download Fira Code v0.5

Problem

Programmers use a lot of symbols, often encoded with several characters. For human brain sequences like ->, <= or := are single logical token, even if they take two or three places on the screen. Your eye spends 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 Fira Mono font extended with a set of 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.

Fira Code (with ligatures):

Compare to Fira Mono (without ligatures):

Editor support

Do not work:

• Atom (bug)
• SublimeText (vote here)
• Intellij Idea (vote here)
• XCode
• iTerm 2 (feature request)
• OS X Terminal.app
• Emacs
• gVim, MacVim

Do work:

• Visual Studio
• TextMate 2
• QtCreator
• LightTable (instructions)
• BBEdit (instructions)
• Chocolat

Should work (copied from Hasklig README):

• Geany
• gEdit
• Kate
• Konsole
• KWrite
• Smultron
• Vico

Note: I’m not a font designer, and Fira Code is built in sort of a hacky way from OTF version of Fira Mono. Please forgive me if it doesn’t work for you. Help will be greatly appreciated.

Code examples

Ruby:

JavaScript:

Erlang:

Go:

Haskell:

Alternatives

Another monospaced fonts with ligatures:

• Hasklig (free)
• PragmataPro (€59)
• Monoid (free)

Credits

This work is based on OFL-licensed Fira Mono font. Original Fira Mono font was not changed, only extended.

Fira Code was inspired by Hasklig font: Ligatures for Haskell code

Changelog

0.5: #{ ~- -~ <== ==> /// ;; </

0.4:

• Added ~= ~~ #[
• Rolled back && and || to more traditional look
• === and !== are now rendered with 3 horisontal bars

0.3: ~@ #? =:= =<

0.2.1: Fixed width of && and ||

0.2: --> <-- && || =>> =/=

0.1

>>= =<< <<= ->> -> => <<- <-
=== == <=> >= <= >> << !== != <>
:= ++ #( #_
:: ... .. !! // /* */ />