Cascadia Code Light Italic doesn't work in Visual Studio 2026

[MrDixioner]

Cascadia family version

2407.024

Cascadia family variant(s)

Cascadia Code (the version with ligatures)

Font file format(s)

.ttf (variable)

Platform

Windows 10 x64

Other Software

Visual Studio 2026 (18.5.0)

What happened?

In Visual Studio 2026's font settings, when setting italic font style anywhere in the text editor, including all code, it doesn't work. However, if you set the font style to normal, italic font style displays perfectly. This is even more surprising, as Microsoft sets Cascadia Code as the default font for Studio, yet it also causes problems with light font styles.

[MrDixioner]

I found a solution. Resaving the font file in FontForge without making any changes or confirming any export errors allows absolutely all fonts to work perfectly with Visual Studio 2026 (and likely previous and future versions), including that italic. I don't know what changes FontForge makes to the font file, but it works. One note: since FontForge doesn't work with variable font files, I was only able to test this with static fonts. I resaved all the static fonts for Cascadia Code and Cascadia Mono, installed them on the system, it placed them in each individual family, and Visual Studio correctly applied the italic to all the fonts.

Note! This only works under the following circumstances:

1. Uninstalling the entire Cascadia font family.
2. Clearing the font cache (CMD as administrator)
   net stop FontCache
del /f /s /q /a %WinDir%\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local\FontCache\*
del /f /q /a %WinDir%\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local\FontCache.dat
net start FontCache
3. Restarting the computer and installing the corrected fonts.

[richardcox13]

Underlying problem here is that Visual Studio's font handling reflects its age.

Remember the Windows font dialog where the style drop down was Regular, Italic, Bold, or Bold Italic? The idea of font weight didn't exit. And Windows doesn't, without extra work by an application, link and italic/bold variants across weight variations.

Visual Studio Code, being based on Chromium, reflects a more modern approach that reflects modern font families.

[MrDixioner]

The saddest thing is that the developers of such a huge product as Visual Studio haven't fixed the well-known font issue for several years. And the funniest thing is that Studio, Studio Code, and the Cascadia fonts are all from the same company. It's sad...

[magiskmod]

The issue is likely occurring because the correct file wasn't downloaded. You can download the appropriate file for your operating system from here.