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Add to SafariWhen comparing Fira Code vs Bitstream DejaVu, the Slant community recommends Fira Code for most people. In the question“What are the best Windows 11 fonts?” Fira Code is ranked 3rd while Bitstream DejaVu is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Fira Code is:
This is particularly beneficial for those who wish to use combined letters such as "æ" and other diphthongs. But when it comes to programming, the ability to scan through your code is improved with ligatures for equality, arrow functions, and more.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Has ligatures
This is particularly beneficial for those who wish to use combined letters such as "æ" and other diphthongs. But when it comes to programming, the ability to scan through your code is improved with ligatures for equality, arrow functions, and more.
Pro Supports retina displays
Fira Coda supports high pixel density retina displays.
Pro Characters look really nice
Some characters that look odd in other monospace fonts look very nice in Fira Code: @, a, 1, lower-case-L, Q, j, *
Pro Good editor support
A list of supported editors and terminals can be found here.
Pro Has a slashed zero
New style since February 2018.
Pro Frequent updates
The repository is frequently updated.
Pro Installs easily on Mac
Many ligature fonts on Github aren't "mac ready". This font comes pre-compiled and ready to install on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Pro Forked from Bitstream's Vera family of typefaces
The Vera fonts changed the way the game was played regarding typeface display on digital displays with full hinting for every glyph, allowing the compositor to tweak any character to render well for the specific pixel pattern it had to use for the position it was placed on the screen. It's a pleasant and high-quality foundation for any typographic endeavour.
Pro DejaVu Sans is an alternative to Microsoft Verdana
Pro Oodles and oodles of mathematical symbols
LaTeX wouldn't be the juggernaut it is currently in academic circles if it weren't for the DejaVu fonts hitting their stride in the same era of computing. So long as there's a bottle of liquor handy and a way to browse the mathematical symbols in the Vera fonts, you'll never be bored and lonely again.
Pro Condensed versions of Sans and Serif
These were easily overlooked until we all started spending half our lives looking at screens that literally fit in the palms of our hands. They're available for all the font weights of both typefaces and the oblique styles as well.
Cons
Con The '@' Symbol is asymmetric
It's a style, but it would be nice if it would wrap and not just cover the top.
Con No true italic
Italic is just a slanted original, an Oblique. Looks ugly and is difficult on the eyes.
Con Noisy serif-like style harming the text clarity
Con Ligatures are nice-looking but harm clarity
Even though the font combines characters into ligatures, you still need to type the normal characters, and the ligatures make that difficult in many cases.
Con Ligatures like == and === are harder to tell apart than they should be
Con Too wide, too large line height
Con Too wide
Much wider than other fonts.
Con Ligatures lump some characters together and make them hard to read
Con Needs support for ligatures
It can't work in plain terminal, must have built in support for ligatures in editor.
Con No Sublime Text support
Not the font's fault but even the latest Sublime Text builds (e.g. 3126) don't support ligatures.
Con Ligatures break correlation between symbols on screen and the number of characters
This makes it easier to lose the grasp how long lines actually are.
Con Curly braces are not clear enough
Curly braches ("{" and "}") are not clear enough. They are too horizontally narrow, making them look almost like pipes ("|").
Con Bad 4 and r characters, dotted 0
WHY is r a serif?
Con Cannot enable alternative stylistic styles on Xcode
I've tried enabling some of the alternate stylistic styles using Xcode's Font picker, via the "Typography" screen. None of the stylistic styles I enable get reflected in Xcode's code editor, even if I restart Xcode from scratch. I'm not sure whether this is a limitation of Xcode, or of the font itself.
