tonsky / 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

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

Terminal compatibility list

Browser support

<!-- HTML -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/distr/fira_code.css">

/* CSS */
@import url(https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/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

• 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_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

• Author: Nikita Prokopov @nikitonsky
• Based on: Fira Mono
• Inspired by: Hasklig