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Fira Code: monospaced font with programming ligatures

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61–70 of 84 posts

Re: Fira Code: monospaced font with programming ligatures

#62
post #12

Really cool, but what, if any, are the plans to get it working with Vim? It's the universal editor you're likely to find everywhere.

Vim isn't there problem, it's your terminal. There is an open feature request with iterm2, but terminal.app is probably a lost cause. I know nothing about the state of Unicode font rendering in Linux.

Strangely enough, I had Terminal.app listed as not supported (at it wasn’t when I checked).

But checking now, ligatures render just fine. Yay! (that implies console vim & emacs, of course)

Re: Fira Code: monospaced font with programming ligatures

#63

What software is typically used to create a font like this? Are there any good open source options?

Glyphs.app provided a free license for Fira Code since font is open-source. I’m using it because original Fira Mono is developed in it as well.

Monoid uses FontForge (free)

Re: Fira Code: monospaced font with programming ligatures

#64
post #57
post #38

As a developer, I have spent years writing and learning to parse the meaning of sequences like ==, ===, And even if I could get my preferred editors to work with it, I would see the traditional symbols when reading code on the web, or pairing with another developer who does not use the font. It seems like a barrier to understanding, something that by nature developers strive to eliminate. I'm torn. This idea could be…

Let’s be realistic. You don’t have learn or retrain your brain to understand Fira Code. Symbols are all the same, they just look better.

Nope. Fira gets semiotics subtly wrong.

For instance, the HTML comment bookends. In Fira, they are long arrows. In plain ASCII they are enclosing brackets connecting to comment.

Re: Fira Code: monospaced font with programming ligatures

#65
post #8

Probably not possible with ligatures/glyph variants but really cool would be grouping of numbers: In groups of three the first digit would be moved to the right and the last one to the left to simulate a narrow space as thousands separator.

I suspect that it's possible, but would require an impractical number (1000) of ligatures in the font.

It’s possible with classes https://medium.com/@larsenwork/class-based-contextual-positi...

And assume we only support 4-10 digit numbers, it would require e.g. 6 rules or so.

But substitutions are done left-to-right, that might be a problem

Re: Fira Code: monospaced font with programming ligatures

#69
post #66
post #21

Probably a silly question, but can't we just generate ttf files from this so that you can use it in any windows editor?

Are there any problems with installing otf on windows? I installed and used them just fine

See I knew it was a silly question :) A few minutes ago I converted the otf files to ttf using font forge. That appeared to work, but it seems the ligatures are gone. On top of that the ttf version of the font did not show up as a monospaced font in my code editor. I might have done something wrong though as I only dabble a bit with font forge.

Then I just did what you suggested, install the otf instead (d'oh) Now the fonts do show up as monospaced font. But my editor does not display the ligatures. But at least it is usable.

Re: Fira Code: monospaced font with programming ligatures

#70
post #57
post #38

As a developer, I have spent years writing and learning to parse the meaning of sequences like ==, ===, And even if I could get my preferred editors to work with it, I would see the traditional symbols when reading code on the web, or pairing with another developer who does not use the font. It seems like a barrier to understanding, something that by nature developers strive to eliminate. I'm torn. This idea could be…

Let’s be realistic. You don’t have learn or retrain your brain to understand Fira Code. Symbols are all the same, they just look better.

The difference between e.g. -> and --> is a length of a small solid line. To me that's equates to a huge drop in readability, countering the easy to brain-parse argument.
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