Lilex is the modern programming font containing a set of ligatures for common programming multi-character combinations.

This is just a font rendering feature: underlying code remains ASCII-compatible. This helps to read and understand code faster. For some frequent sequences like .. or //, ligatures allow us to correct spacing like kerning pairs.

Compiled versions are available under releases.

Examples

JavaScript (JSX)

PHP

Go

C

Stylistic sets

Additional features are available in the font, which are disabled by default.

Setup

At the moment building is possible on Ubuntu and macOS. First, install the build dependencies.

macOS

brew install cairo freetype harfbuzz pkg-config

Ubuntu

sudo apt install python3-setuptools ttfautohint build-essential libffi-dev libgit2-dev

Common

And then setup virtual environment:

make configure

Build

Now run the command to build it.

make build

or

./scripts/lilex.py build

Forced feature activation

The builder gives you the ability to forcibly enable any font features. This works by moving their code to the calt. If ligatures work, the selected features will also work.

To do this, regenerate the source file with the features:

./scripts/lilex.py --features 'sups,zero' generate -o Lilex.custom.glyphs

And then build the binaries from the new source:

./scripts/lilex.py -i Lilex.custom.glyphs build

Credits

• Author: Mikhael Khrustik
• Based on: IBM Plex Mono
• Inspired by: Fira Code