Adding Fira Code font for better editing

If you want to try a topic that can quickly lead to a (warm? heated?) discussion, say out loud that the best font for programming is such and such, and just wait! I don't want to start any arguments, but I can certainly recommend a font that can make your JS code look much better, and become more readable.

An article in Slant, at https://www.slant.co/topics/67/~best-programming-fonts, lists over 100 programming fonts; did you even think so many were available?

The key to a better font hinges on the concept of ligatures. In typography, a ligature occurs when two or more letters are joined, becoming a single character. OK, the proper technical word would be glyph, but let's not make it more complicated than needed!

Some ligatures you may not be aware of are these: the ampersand character (&) was originally a ligature of the letters E and t, spelling out et in Latin, meaning and. Similarly, the German ß character was a ligature of two s letters, next to each other, and the Spanish Ñ originally was a pair of N characters, one written on top of the other.

In JS, there are many symbols that are written as two or more characters, just because no other way is available. For example, the greater than or equal to symbol is typed as >=, which doesn't look as good as the mathematical symbol ≥, does it? Other combinations are <= (less than or equal to), => (for arrow functions, which we'll meet in Chapter 2, Using Modern JavaScript Features), the binary shift operators << and >>, the equality operators == and === (plus the corresponding != and !==), and more.

Do not confuse ligatures with kerning. Both have to do with showing adjacent characters, but the former refers to joining characters and replacing them with a new one, while the latter deals with reducing the distance between characters. If you place an f next to an i, kerning would make them closer without overlapping (in the same way that you can reduce spacing between A and V because of the letters' shapes), while a ligature would replace both characters with fi, actually joining both letters.

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Table of Contents for
Adding Fira Code font for better editing