Fira code fonts mess-up in Intellij IDEA

The beautiful, open source, with ligatures, font Fira Code

Some month ago I see someone talking about the best fonts and themes for their Intellij IDEA setup. One of the setups is really good, it was my first time to know that symbols such as `<=’ or `->’ can be display as beautiful arrows at runtime by supported software and a supported font.

The font that mentioned was Fira Code

Install FiraCode and fonts mess up in various programs

I do like the beautiful ligatures. And, `choco search fira’ shows that the font can be easily installed by Chocolatey, Great!!!

Anyway, things are not as good as I expected. Fira code fonts seems not work well in my Windows 7 ClearType environment.

It shows up hideous in my Emacs buffer, even worse, it will mess up totally in J2SE Swing program if subpixel hint is turned on.

Recovery method

I tried several recovery methods, they are either no help or fail back to old situation after one or two cycles of Windows reboot.

• Remove/reinstall

• manually remove fonts from windows fonts DIR

  • Fira code fonts got default medium style after reinstall.

  • Removed extra fonts? Not sure if font awesome conflicts with Fira Code.

Revert to `Consolas’ after all

Sadly, this is what really helps at last. Without beautiful ligatures, but at least I got clean and beautiful fonts displayed.