Programmers use a lot of symbols, often encoded with several characters. For human brain sequences like ->, <= or := are single logical token, even if they take two or three places on the screen. Your eye spends 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 a Fira Mono font extended with 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.
Compare to Fira Mono (without ligatures):
Do not work:
- Atom (bug)
- SublimeText (vote here)
- Intellij Idea (vote here)
- XCode
- iTerm 2 (feature request)
- OS X Terminal.app
- Emacs
- gVim, MacVim
- Eclipse (vote here)
Do work:
- Visual Studio
- TextMate 2
- QtCreator
- LightTable (instructions)
- BBEdit — enter this command in a terminal to enable ligatures:
defaults write com.barebones.bbedit "EnableFontLigatures_Fira Code" -bool YES - RStudio
- Chocolat
Should work (copied from Hasklig README):
- Geany
- gEdit
- Kate
- Konsole
- KWrite
- Smultron
- Vico
Note: I’m not a font designer, and Fira Code is built in sort of a hacky way from OTF version of Fira Mono. Please forgive me if it doesn’t work for you. Help will be greatly appreciated.
Ruby:
JavaScript:
Erlang:
Go:
Haskell:
Another monospaced fonts with ligatures:
- Hasklig (free)
- PragmataPro (€59)
- Monoid (free)
This work is based on OFL-licensed Fira Mono font. Original Fira Mono font was not changed, only extended
Fira Code was inspired by Hasklig font: Ligatures for Haskell code
0.6:
Redrawn from Fira Mono 3.204 (slightly heavier weight)
Added:
** *** +++ -- --- ?:
/= /== .= ^= =~ ?= ||= |=
<<< <=< -<< -< >- >>- >=> >>>
<*> <|> <$> <+>
<!-- {- -} /** \\ \\\
..< ?? ||| &&& <| |>
and Powerline support
0.5: #{ ~- -~ <== ==> /// ;; </
0.4:
- Added
~=~~#[ - Rolled back
&&and||to more traditional look ===and!==are now rendered with 3 horisontal bars
0.3: ~@ #? =:= =<
0.2.1: Fixed width of && and ||
0.2: --> <-- && || =>> =/=
0.1
>>= =<< <<= ->> -> => <<- <-
=== == <=> >= <= >> << !== != <>
:= ++ #( #_
:: ... .. !! // /* */ />