tonsky/FiraCode

Fira Code: free monospaced font with programming ligatures

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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

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 (cv01, cv02, etc), stylistic sets (ss01, ss02, etc), and other font features (zero, onum, calt, etc), 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. Implementation detail: there is no way for programs to detect whether a font has progress bar glyphs at U+EE00, so they need to decide what to output without knowing if it will be rendered properly or not. We propose a new environment variable, UNICODE_PROGRESS_BAR=true, to use as a heuristic. If present, it’s safe to assume U+EE00..EE0B will be rendered properly.

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
• 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

If you want to permanently enable certain style sets or character variations, maybe because your editor of choice does not allow you to toggle these individually, you can provide the desired features as a comma separated list to the build script via the -f / --features flag.
Default: none.

To separate different versions of your font you can specify the desired font family name with the -n / --family-name flag. The special value 'features' will append a sorted, space separated list of enabled features to the default family name.
Default: "Fira Code"

You can also limit the font weights that will be created with the -w / --weights option.
Default: "Light,Regular,Retina,Medium,SemiBold,Bold"

# locally in your shell
./script/build.sh --features "ss02,ss08,ss10,cv03,cv07,cv14" --family-name "Fira Code straight" --weights "Regular,Bold"

# or via a docker container (creates the family name 'Fira Code cv01 cv02 cv06 cv31 onum ss01 ss03 ss04 zero')
docker run --rm -v "${PWD}":/opt tonsky/firacode:latest ./script/build.sh -f "cv01,cv02,cv06,ss01,zero,onum,ss03,ss04,cv31" -n "features"

# in Git Bash from Git for Windows, or any other MSYS2 based shell, you might need to disable path conversion
MSYS2_ARG_CONV_EXCL="*" docker run --rm -v "${PWD}":/opt tonsky/firacode:latest ./script/build.sh -f "ss02,ss03,ss04,ss05,ss06,ss07"

Credits

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