/FiraCode

Free monospaced font with programming ligatures

Primary LanguageClojureSIL Open Font License 1.1OFL-1.1

Fira Code: free monospaced font with programming ligatures

Fira Code

Read in Español | 简体中文

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

Fira_Code_v6.2.zip - December 6, 2021 - 2.5 MB

Then:

Sponsors

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!

Huge thanks to:

WorkOS
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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
TeXShop
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 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):
  • gtkterm
  • guake
  • LXTerminal
  • sakura
  • Terminator
  • xfce4-terminal
mate-terminal
rxvt
terminology
xterm
ChromeOS crosh (instructions)

Browser support

<!-- HTML -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/firacode@6.2.0/distr/fira_code.css">
/* CSS */
@import url(https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/firacode@6.2.0/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