This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Channel 9.
I found today's post topic via Sergey Vlasov's, Read and understand code faster with programming ligatures in Fira Code font, post and wondered how have I never seen this, or like, font? Needless to say, now that I've found it, I'm not giving it back! :)
What's the big deal? Check it out...
FiraCode
Problem
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.Solution
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....