Things I Think Are Cool is a blog series where I talk about things I have found interesting and helpful. They can be time savers, productivity tools, podcasts, books, products, or even people.
Where would developers be without monospaced fonts? Those fonts where each character takes up the same amount of screen real-estate.
It becomes a whole lot easier to distinguish "special" characters such as punctuation when using a monospaced font - because each character is given the exact same amount of space. Which is why they are great for software development with all the "weird" symbols we're using all the time. (I mean, come on, who else types = and > in succession more often than us?)
However not all monospaced fonts are created the same. There are the old standbys of Courier and Consolas and the like, and they do their job - but they weren't developed specifically with software development in mind.
There is one however that is - and it's name is FiraCode - and that's what this week's Things I Think Are Cool is all about!
Why It's Cool
FiraCode code uses ligatures to turn combinations of characters specific to development (e.g. the => mentioned above) into something that looks like a single character.
This is best served with an example - with FiraCode on top.
- Versus -
- Versus -
 __\- Versus -__ 
It truly does convert multi-character sequences that convey "one thought" to a developer into something that looks like a single character!
How To Get It
I found out about FiraCode via Twitter ... several people in the Xamarin community were all abuzz about it a couple of months ago. However, I can't seem to search out their tweets to give them credit :(
But here are the "official" sources:
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