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:
Erlang:
Elixir:
Go:
LiveScript:
Clojure:
Swift:
| Works | Doesn’t work |
|---|---|
| Black Screen | Alacritty |
| Butterfly | cmd.exe |
| Hyper.app | Cmder |
| Konsole | ConEmu |
| QTerminal | GNOME Terminal |
| Terminal.app (OS X default terminal) | iTerm 2 (coming in 3.1) |
| Termux (Android terminal emulator) | mate-terminal |
| ZOC (macOS) | mintty |
| PuTTY | |
| rxvt | |
| ZOC (Windows) | |
| gtkterm, guake, LXTerminal, sakura, Terminator, xfce4-terminal, and other libvte-based terminals (bug report) |
- IE 10+, Edge: enable with
font-feature-settings: "calt" 1; - Firefox
- Safari
- Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Opera)
- ACE
- CodeMirror (enable with
font-variant-ligatures: contextual;)
Other monospaced fonts with ligatures:
- Hasklig (free)
- PragmataPro (€59)
- Monoid (free)
- Fixedsys Excelsior (free)
- Iosevka (free)
- DejaVu Sans Code (free)
- Author: Nikita Prokopov @nikitonsky
- Based on: Fira Mono
- Inspired by: Hasklig
- Software: Glyphs 2 (thx Georg Seifert for a license)