If you spend your day in a code editor like Visual Studio, you want to make the experience as good as it gets. One simple change you can make is to change your font. You’ll be surprised how a font change can make your code more readable and make writing software more enjoyable.

• Fira Code Visual Studio Code
• Install Fira Code Visual Studio
• Fira Code Visual Studio 2015
• Fira Code Visual Studio 2017

A quick dive into Font Ligatures, what they are and how to use them in Visual Studio Code.Grab Fira Code and learn how to install it in your favorite editor. Google Fonts is a library of 1052 free licensed font families and APIs for conveniently using the fonts via CSS and Android. We also provide delightful, beautifully crafted icons for common actions and items.

Here is an example of code using the font Consolas

This next sample uses FiraCode. In many ways it looks similar to Consolas, but it adds some cool features. In particular, it works really well with symbols that are made up of multiple characters. Check out the Lambda expression in the sample below. It makes “=>” look really cool. It works really well for “” and “” and “>=”, etc. These things are called Ligatures. I really don’t know much about fonts. It is all explained pretty well on GitHub where you can download and install the font (they provide instructions too).

Fira Code Visual Studio Code

Here is a screenshot from the GitHub site for FiraCode that shows how it looks for various multi-character symbols…

So, chose a font that works great for you! I like FiraCode. You can read more and download FiraCode here.

I have recently got into caligraphy and thought it would be neat to see cursive in my code editor as well. A quick google and I found a monospaced cursive font with ligatures! (Ligatures are basically symbols that replace pieces of code like ! to single looking character.) It’s really nice and makes some things very easy to read on top of making the coding experience a little more fun.

To get started…

• You’ll first need to download Fira Code fonts and install them.
• Install and apply Dark++ Italic theme.
• Open your VS Codesettings.json file and add the following lines:

You could be done at this point if you are fine with the Dark++ Italic theme colors. Or you could add these additional settings to your settings.json to override any themes’ font configuration:

Install Fira Code Visual Studio

Note: I added a some additional italics that Dark++ Italic didn’t have, like comment.

Conclusion

Fira Code Visual Studio 2015

Fira Code Visual Studio 2017

While taking notes can sometimes seem boring, it can be fun with a nice pen, some ink, and the right notepad. Adding Dark++ Italic and Fira Code does that to my IDE. There are also other monospaced cursive fonts out there like Operator Mono Lig, for example. Try some out and see what works for you. Have fun.