Ligature Fonts for Terminal, VS Code, Neovim and Emacs

Overview

Ligature Font

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.

iTerm2 Configure Ligature Font

Kitty

In kitty.conf, I configure it to use Monoid

font_size 16.0
font_family Monoid

Ligature Font in kitty

Code Editors