Fixedsys Excelsior font with programming ligatures

Created by Darien Valentine

Font website

This font is a simulated 8x16 bitmap font from old Windows and DOS. It was truly monospaced and really bitmapped and initially contained only Western ASCII charset. Darien simulated the bitmap with TrueType outlines by building the font from 10x10 squares ("pixels") and then joining the squares together. As such, this font only works as intended in only one size and usually with antialiasing switched off. The size is 16px or 12pt.

He also added a lot of foreign characters and made the font Unicode.

The font is distributed in binary TTF format and I decompiled it with TTX, added a few symbols inspired by Fira Code and created necessary ligatures.

To design the symbols I used quad lined paper, pencil and rubber eraser. Like in good old days, you know.

The supported programming ligatures are listed in the ligatures.txt file.

To create a TTF file from TTX XML just run ttx -f FSEX301.ttx (-f means overwrite) or use OS X Makefile to also copy to the user Fonts folder and update font cache.

I only tested in MacVim so far (this is the only editor I use). Comments and bug reports welcome. MacVim should be quite recent for ligatures to work.

Add the following to your .vimrc:

set guifont=Fixedsys\ Excelsior:h16
set noanti 
set macligatures