Fira Code is the perfect font for programmers
Fira Code is a font that aims to make programmers’ lives easier. It achieves this through a unique feature: it improves code readability.
The challenge in programming is often that multiple characters are used to represent a single symbol. Such symbols are often represented by operators such as “:=”, “//” or “<=".
In a block of code, these symbols take the place of two characters, which means that the code reader has to mentally put the characters together and decipher their meaning.
This process could be much simpler if the symbols just took the space of a character, making them directly recognizable and readable as a single symbol. This is where Fira Code comes into play.
Fira Code joins these ligatures commonly used in code languages and gives them single symbol spacing. The font is free on GitHub available and contains universally used ligatures such as different equals, signs for comments or signs from arithmetic.
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In addition, there are specific ligatures for different programming languages like HTML, JavaScript, C#, Scala, Rust and many others.
As a special gimmick, according to the developer, Fira Code is the first programming font with special glyphs for rendering progress bars. They consist of an empty bar, a full bar and a spinning circle.
The font is already fully functional and will be continuously developed. Developer Nikita Prokopov is diligently working on a backlog of issues, mostly including new ligatures and bug fixes for old ligatures.
If you want to support Prokopov, go ahead GitHub Sponsors or Patreon. Programmers looking to improve their code readability should definitely give Fira Code a shot.
The benefits of using this font are obvious, and the developer’s continuous improvement and updates ensure that it remains relevant and useful in the future.
