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 a free monospaced font containing 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.
Fira Code is a personal, free-time project with no funding and huge [feature request backlog](https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/issues). If you love it, consider supporting its development via [GitHub Sponsors](https://github.com/sponsors/tonsky) or [Patreon](https://patreon.com/tonsky). Any help counts!
### What’s in the box?
Left: ligatures as rendered in Fira Code. Right: same character sequences without ligatures.
<imgsrc="./showcases/v3/all_ligatures.png">
Fira Code comes with a few different character variants, so that everyone can choose what’s best for them. [How to enable](https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/wiki/How-to-enable-stylistic-sets)
<imgsrc="./showcases/v3/stylistic_sets.png">
In addition to that, Fira Code contains huge variety of Unicode characters well-suited for technical writing, math formulas and terminal UIs.
* Pick your font family and then select from the `'complete'` directory.
* If you are on Windows pick a font with the `'Windows Compatible'` suffix.
* This includes specific tweaks to ensure the font works on Windows, in particular monospace identification and font name length limitations
* If you are limited to monospaced fonts (because of your terminal, etc) then pick a font with the `'Mono'` suffix.
* This denotes that the Nerd Font glyphs will be monospaced not necessarily that the entire font will be monospaced
### Ligatures
By the *Nerd Font* policy, the variant with the `'Mono'` suffix is not supposed to have any ligatures.
Use the non-*Mono* variants to have ligatures.
### Explanation
Once you narrow down your font choice of family (`Droid Sans`, `Inconsolata`, etc) and style (`bold`, `italic`, etc) you have 2 main choices:
#### `Option 1: Download already patched font`
* download an already patched font from the `complete` folder
* This is most likely the one you want. It includes **all** of the glyphs from all of the glyph sets. Only caution here is that some fonts have glyphs in the _same_ code point so to include everything some had to be moved to alternate code points.
#### `Option 2: Patch your own font`
* patch your own variations with the various options provided by the font patcher (see each font's readme for full list of combinations available)
* This is the option you want if the font you use is _not_ already included or you want maximum control of what's included
* This contains a list of _all permutations_ of the various glyphs. E.g. You want the font with only [Octicons][octicons] or you want the font with just [Font Awesome][font-awesome] and [Devicons][vorillaz-devicons]. The goal is to provide every combination possible in this folder.
For more information see: [The FAQ](https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/wiki/FAQ-and-Troubleshooting#which-font)