Fira Code: 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

Download Fira Code v1.102 | Follow updates 📢 @FiraCode

Fira Code is an extension of the Fira Mono font containing 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.

Terminal support

Works	Doesn’t work
Black Screen	GNOME Terminal
Konsole	iTerm 2 (feature request)
QTerminal	rxvt
Terminal.app (OS X default terminal)	xfce4-terminal
Termux (Android terminal emulator)

Editor support

Works	Doesn’t work
Anjuta (unless at the EOF)	Arduino IDE
Atom 1.1 or newer (instructions)	Adobe Dreamweaver
BBEdit (instructions)	Eclipse (Mac and Win, vote here)
Brackets (with this plugin)	Standalone Emacs (workaround)
Chocolat	gVim
Coda 2	IDLE
CodeLite	KDevelop 4
Eclipse (Linux)	Monkey Studio IDE
Geany	NetBeans
gEdit / Pluma	Notepad++
GNOME Builder	Spyder IDE
IntelliJ products (IDEA etc, instructions)	SublimeText (vote here)
Kate, KWrite
Komodo
Leafpad
LibreOffice
LightTable (instructions)
MacVim 7.4 or newer (instructions)
Mancy
Meld
Mousepad
Notepad (Win)
QtCreator
RStudio (instructions)
Scratch
TextAdept (Linux, Mac)
TextEdit
TextMate 2
Visual Studio 2015
Visual Studio Code (instructions)
Xamarin Studio/Monodevelop
Xcode (with this plugin)
Probably work: Smultron, Vico	Under question: Code::Blocks IDE

Browser support

• IE 10+, Edge: enable with font-feature-settings: "calt" 1;
• Firefox
• Safari
• Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Opera):
  • enable with font-variant-ligatures: contextual; or text-rendering: optimizeLegibility, see 571246
• ACE
• CodeMirror

Code examples

Ruby:

JavaScript:

Erlang:

Go:

Haskell:

Alternatives

Other monospaced fonts with ligatures:

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

Credits

• Author: Nikita Prokopov @nikitonsky
• Based on: Fira Mono
• Inspired by: Hasklig
• Software: Glyphs 2 (thx Georg Seifert for a license)

Changelog

1.102

• Support for IntelliJ-based IDEs (instructions)
• Turned on autohinting

1.101

• Added Light weight
• Adjusted rules when vertical centering of :, -, * and + occurs

1.100

• Fixed calt table conflicts (---- would incorrectly render as <!--)
• Added centered : (between digits, e.g. 10:40)
• Added lowercase-aligned -, * and + (only between lowercase letters, e.g. kebab case var-name, pointers *ptr etc)

1.000

Added weights:

• Retina (just slightly heavier than Regular)
• Medium
• Bold

Switched to calt instead of liga. You can now “step inside” the ligature in text editors.

Fira Code is now drawn and built in Glyphs 2 app (should improve compatibility).

Added:

<-> <~~ <~ ~~~ ~> ~~>
<$ <+ <* *> +> $>
;;; ::: !!! ??? %% %%% ## ### ####
.- #_( =< **/ 0x www []

Redrawn:

{- -} ~= =~ =<< >>= <$> <=> .=

Removed: ?:

Total ligatures count: 115

0.6

Redrawn from Fira Mono 3.204 (slightly heavier weight)

Added:

** *** +++ -- --- ?:
/= /== .= ^= =~ ?= ||= |=
<<< <=< -<< -< >- >>- >=> >>>
<*> <|> <$> <+>
<!-- {- -} /** \\ \\\ ..< ?? ||| &&& <| |>

Added support for Powerline

0.5

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

0.4

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

0.3

Added: ~@ #? =:= =<

0.2.1

Fixed width of && and ||

0.2

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

0.1

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