Ligature Fonts for Terminal, VS Code, Neovim and Emacs

alpha2phi

Dec 25, 2020·3 min read

Overview

Ligatures are special characters in a font that combine two or more characters into one. In this article I am going to show you how to configure ligature fonts for terminal emulators (Alacritty, iTerm2 and kitty) and code editors (VS Code, Neovim and Emacs).

Ligature Fonts

There are many ligature fonts freely available but in this article I will only show you the fonts listed below interchangeably between various terminals emulators and code editors.

• FiraCode
• Monoid
• Iosevka
• Victor Mono
• Cascadia Code

Ligature Font in Terminal Emulator

Alacritty

The current version of Alacritty does not support ligature. There is a fork available here that I use.

Clone and build alacritty from the repository.

# git clone https://github.com/zenixls2/alacritty.git
# cd alacritty
# git checkout ligature
# cargo build --release

Configure .alacritty.yml to use Fira Code.

font:
  normal:
    family: Fira Code
    style: Regular
  bold:
    family: Fira Code
    style: Bold
  italic:
    family: Fira Code
    style: Italic
  size: 17

I use this in my machine running Arch Linux. Currently it does not seem to work for macOS.

iTerm2

For iTerm2, I configure it to use Victor Mono and check Use ligatures. iTerm2 also warns you that Enabling ligatures may reduce performance.

Kitty

In kitty.conf, I configure it to use Monoid

font_size 16.0
font_family Monoid

Code Editors

Developers may prefer to use ligature code fonts as we are reading and writing code most of the days. Of course this is personal preference.

Visual Studio Code

It is very easy to configure ligature font in Visual Studio Code. Just install the font you prefer and configure it in user settings. E.g. I configure VS Code to use Cascadia Code

settings.json

"editor.fontLigatures": true,
"editor.fontFamily": "Cascadia Code, Menlo, Monaco, 'Courier New', monospace"

Neovim

I normally use Neovim in a terminal so the terminal emulator need to support ligature font for Neovim to display the symbols correctly.

Using kitty, Neovim is able to display ligature font correctly.

Emacs

For Emacs, I use ligature.el.

ligature.el is not in MELPA so I have to git clone it locally and then load it in init.el

For using digraphs as alternative to ligatures, check out the following article.