Cascadia Code is an open-source monospaced font created by Microsoft, first released in 2020. It’s used as the default font in the official Windows Terminal app.
Similar to Intel’s One Mono, JetBrains’ Mono and IBM’s Plex, Cascadia Code is a clear, legible, modern monospaced font designed for terminal use and code editing, with a wide range of programming ligatures provided.
Earlier this month, the font received its first update in nearly 3 years. And per the release announcement it delivers a sizeable uplift that more than makes up for the wait!
Existing users will likely upgrade anyway, but what about those unfamiliar with the font? There are a number of neat new inclusions that could tempt developers, ASCII/ANSI artists, and retro-computing enthusiasts to developers alike to try it out.
Cascadia Code Now Retro Terminal Friendly
Cascadia Code 2404.03 introduces 1,140 new glyphs, including a glut of legacy computing symbols like sextants, octants, eights, sedecimants, quadrants (separated), segmented digits, circles, checkerboard patterns, and large type pieces (Unicode 16.0 spec).
Heard of Nerd Fonts? It’s a project that patches more icons, symbols, and glyphs to a number of popular developer-focused fonts. Those glyphs can be used to both prettify and enhance the kinds of visual information relayed through coding and command-line UIs.
But you won’t need to use a 3rd-party repack of Cascadia Code, as a pair of new Nerd Font variants ship with this release: Cascadia Code NF and Cascadia Mono NF. Both versions offer the full glut of metrics-compatible Nerd Font glyphs as of April 2024.
(The difference between the ‘code’ and ‘mono’ versions: code is a full-featured font with all styles, symbols, ligatures, etc., while mono omits programming ligatures).
You’ll notice in the screenshot above that Microsoft chose to demo the updated font using Ubuntu for WSL running in the Windows Terminal app — nice touch!
If you have an older version of Cascadia Code installed, Microsoft recommends removing/uninstalling it before replacing it with a new version to avoid “improper rendering”.
• Download Cascadia Code on Github