I noticed there aren't any clear instructions on setting up Operator Mono in Webstorm or any of the Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEs. Changing the font doesn't work quite like one would expect, like the italics, but you can get it working with a little TLC. Out-of-the-box, my copy wasn't supporting alt-characters for italics and it needed to use a fallback font for characters. Webstorm like new IDEs support characters regularly not found in many fonts, called Orthographic ligatures (ligatures). These include less common font glyphs and assist by saving space and are more distinguishable. For examples of ligatures, see Medium.com Ligatures & Coding by Andreas Larsen. Adding the ligatures also seems to fix Operator Mono's italic character set although it could be Operator Mono vs Operator Mono SSM (Screensmart).

  1. Download the latest release from the operator-mono-lig project and decompress it
  2. You'll need to copy Operator Mono into original the directory located in the newly created folder, operator-mono-lig.
  3. Next, open a terminal window and install fontools, pip3 install fonttools
  4. Navigate to your newly created operator-mono-lig folder in the terminal and run npm install
  5. The run ./build.sh from the root directory
  6. Your newly created fonts will be located in the build directory
  7. Next, install your fonts. The easiest way to install the fonts is to select all the fonts in finder and double click, then click install. This will install them correctly and appear as new font family, Operator Mono Sm Lit, or something similar.
  8. Go into Webstorm, Open preferences, Editor, then Font, and select your newly created font.

To get Webstorm to behave like Atom or VScode, you'll need to manually edit the code styles to use the italics. It only takes a few minutes. I recommend viewing code within Atom as a reference point using Operator Mono as it makes very good use of Mono's italics. I also have guides for Setting up Operator Mono for Atom and Setting up Operator Mono in Coda.

Troubleshooting: I noticed that the original Operator Mono font I had didn't work, I redownloaded Operator Mono SSM, and it worked. SSM is the limited weight set that removes several weights like thin, ultra). File names cannot have any spaces. I'm also using the material UI for WebStorm, which may or may not make a difference.