Despite the newly installed Fira code being available in the font list and changing the Visual Studio 2015 font to something different to what I was using (Consolas) it wasn't really doing it right. A restart of Visual Studio sorted it out. It was during the summer of ’18 that I established the syntax-highlighted colorful code blocks on this site with Prism.I truly loved creating this (even while on vacation) and wanted to put the icing on the cake by using a special developer font called Fira Code.

After downloading the file you'll want to double click on each.ttf file to install the Fira Code iScript font on your machine. Update VS Code Preferences. Next, open up VSCode and go to Preferences Settings. Under the Text Editor tab you'll see an option that says Font, click on that and add Fira Code iScript to the Font Family textbox. In order to take advantage of Ligatures Limited, you must first have ligatures enabled in Visual Studio Code, and have a ligature font like Fira Code installed and selected (click here for instructions). Ligatures handled by Ligatures Limited. As rendered using Fira Code: Fira Code again, but with all ligatures suppressed.

Every so often I get the urge to find a new programming font. The pattern tends to be.. I look for a bit, can't find anything I really like, then go back to the stock Consolas. About a year later, the same thing happens again. Then back to Consolas. And so on.

However, about a month ago - the last iteration of this was slightly different! I tweeted out the following tweet ..

What's your favourite programming font? I normally use the stock Consolas, but got the urge for a change!

— Dan Clarke (@dracan) November 6, 2017

A few of the replies raved about a font called Fira Code! At this point, I had already tried a few others, and was getting ready to go back to Consolas again - until I installed Fira Code, and immediately loved it!

Forgetting about this very cool thing called 'ligatures' (which I'll talk about in a bit) - it's a really nice looking font too. I've now installed it on all the different things I use - eg. Visual Studio,VSCode, LINQPad, ConEmu, WinMerge, etc, etc. Java se 6 download for mac os.

As well as looking really nice - it also supports ligatures - which is basically where multiple characters are represented by a single symbol (or glyph).

Install Fira Code Visual Studio Code

Below are a few examples (without ligatures enabled on the left, with ligatures enabled on the right). These are a very small subset of what's available, just to give an example.

Visual Studio Code Fira Code Font

You don't have to actually do anything to turn the two characters into a single symbol, and they're still actually stored as two characters on disk. It's just a font rendering thing. As soon as you type the second character of the set, your editor will render the ligature instead.

Visual Studio Code Fira Code Ligatures

It takes a bit of getting used to, and you don't have to have ligatures enabled to use this font. I quite like it though - especially the lambda arrow symbol.

I've been using this for over a month now, and am fairly sure that it's going to be my main programming font now for a long time to come. A massive thank you to Nikita Prokopov for all the hard work he has put into this amazing font!

Please retweet if you enjoyed this post ..

Fira Code With Ligatures

Blogged: 'Fira Code: My New Favorite Programming Font' https://t.co/yWkCdg0JJs@FiraCode@nikitonsky#programming#fonts

Enable Font Ligatures Vs Code

— Dan Clarke (@dracan) December 14, 2017