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.

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.

Ruby:

JavaScript:

PHP:

Erlang:

Elixir:

Go:

LiveScript:

Clojure:

Swift:

Stylistic sets:

See How to enable

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

/* CSS */
@import url(https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/tonsky/[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: enable with font-feature-settings: "calt";
• Firefox
• Safari
• Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Opera)
• ACE
• CodeMirror (enable with font-variant-ligatures: contextual;)

• All JetBrains products
• CodePen
• Blink Shell
• Klipse
• IlyaBirman.net
• EvilMartians.com
• Web Maker
• FromScratch
• PEP20.org

Other monospaced fonts with ligatures:

• Hasklig (free)
• PragmataPro (€59)
• Monoid (free)
• Fixedsys Excelsior (free)
• Iosevka (free)
• DejaVu Sans Code (free)
• Victor Mono (free)
• Cascadia Code (free)

In case you want to alter FiraCode.glyphs and build OTF/TTF/WOFF files yourself, this is setup I use on macOS:

# install all required build tools
./script/bootstrap

# build the font files
./script/build

# install OTFs to ~/Library/Fonts
./script/install

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