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Installing FiraCode on Windows and Ubuntu

josuerodriguez98

Josué Rodríguez (He/Him)

Posted on January 13, 2020

Installing FiraCode on Windows and Ubuntu

Hello again, JD here. Today I'm writing about how to install FiraCode on Windows and Ubuntu. This post is copying and pasting some commands on the console (at least that's the way I do it). So let's get to it.

About FiraCode

FiraCode is a monospaced font with programming ligatures developed by Nikita Prokopov (tonsky on GitHub).

GitHub logo tonsky / FiraCode

Free monospaced font with programming ligatures

Fira Code: free monospaced font with programming ligatures

Fira Code

Read in Español | 简体中文 | 日本語

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 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.

Download & Install

Fira_Code_v6.2.zip - December 6, 2021 - 2.5 MB

Then:



View on GitHub




By the time I discovered FiraCode I was working on some JavaScript projects and that's the main reason I became so attracted to the font. FiraCode gives the arrow functions, the "===" and many other things an amazing look.

FiraCode example

Installing on Windows

To install FiraCode on Windows we are going to use Chocolatey.
Note: If you have Python installed on Windows, I suggest you run the following command to verify if you have Chocolatey installed. Python installs Chocolatey to fetch some dependencies.



choco -v
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If it returns the version number, then you're all set and you can jump directly to FiraCode command. If it doesn't, then run one of the following commands with administrative permissions to install Chocolatey.

Run this command on the CMD 



@"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"
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Or run this command on PowerShell 



Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))
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FiraCode command

Finally, run this command to install FiraCode:



choco install firacode
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And voilà! We've got FiraCode installed on Windows!

Installing on Ubuntu

To install FiraCode on Ubuntu you have to enable the universe repository. To do this we have to run the following commands on the terminal:



sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo apt update
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If that command doesn't work, try this one instead:



sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) universe"
sudo apt update
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And finally, run the command:



sudo apt install fonts-firacode
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Ta-da! FiraCode is now on Ubuntu!

Conclusion

That's it! We've successfully installed FiraCode on both Windows and Ubuntu! Let me know in the comments if this was helpful, or if there's something I should improve! 😁

💖 💪 🙅 🚩
josuerodriguez98
Josué Rodríguez (He/Him)

Posted on January 13, 2020

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Installing FiraCode on Windows and Ubuntu
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January 13, 2020