How to make your code look cool using Firicico!
Tags: ide, vscode, howto, code
Published: 2019-06-22 16:31:52

---
title: How to make your code look cool using Firicico!
published: true
description: How to make your code look like the cool people's code without spending any money.
cover_image: https://res.cloudinary.com/owl3rty/image/upload/c_crop,g_center,h_1600,q_72,w_4608/v1561219408/dev.to/Firicico/antonio-dicaterina-492931-unsplash.jpg
tags: ide, vscode, howto, code
---

Man. All of the coolest coding tutorial videos seem to use [Dank Mono](https://dank.sh/) in their IDE (_Integrated Development Environment_) but who can afford to drop that much money on a font just to make your code look cool?

Enter the poor developer's substitute font, [Firicico](https://github.com/kosimst/Firicico). Firicico is a combination of the Google Font Pacifico (which is used for swoopy font) and Fira Code for the default font. You'll have to turn on font ligatures in your IDE to get the full swoopy font effect.

Upon seeing the changes Firicico made to my IDE a peer said, 

> "Omg. I hate it so much lol"

This is a fair first impression but I have counterpoints!

## Cool Ass Symbols

Do you ever have to squint at your monitor and count how many equal signs you actually used? (Okay, me neither, but hypothetically this could be a situation.) Well! Count no more because Firicico uses ligatures and stuff to render your multiple equal signs as symbols!

 ![Demo of all of the equal sign combos](https://res.cloudinary.com/owl3rty/image/upload/v1561219032/dev.to/Firicico/Firicico-equal.png)

And it will do the same with arrows!

![Demo of all of the arrow combos](https://res.cloudinary.com/owl3rty/image/upload/v1561219032/dev.to/Firicico/Firicico-arrows.png)

Whoah. That's pretty awesome. Who wouldn't want really cool symbols in their code?

## Fancy Looking Code! 

Look at how fancy my code is. 

![The fanciest looking Node script you'll ever see](https://res.cloudinary.com/owl3rty/image/upload/v1561219032/dev.to/Firicico/Firicico-node.png)

My IDE is VSCode and I'm using the using _Monokai Dark Soda_ theme. 

Confession time, I increased the default font-size to 20px because I'm old and the Pacifico part of Firicico is unreadable even at 18px. Which isn't a huge problem in the JS code above but if you're working on a JSON file...

![JSON looks chaotic with this font](https://res.cloudinary.com/owl3rty/image/upload/v1561219032/dev.to/Firicico/Firicico-json.png)

...yikes! That's some loopy chaos to try to decipher. I'll adjust it next time I get some free time but out of the box, it's hellish.

## Conclusion

Alright, so those aren't the best counterpoints but they're all I got! I want my code to look cool and I want to annoy my coworkers at my next lunch and learn presentation and Firicico is going to do the job for free!

If that's not enough motivation to try [Firicico](https://github.com/kosimst/Firicico) then I have nothing for you.

---

Cover photo by [Antonio DiCaterina](https://unsplash.com/@antonio_dicaterina?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/search/photos/calligraphy?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)