Font Awesome Text-Decoration and Link Underline

By  on  

If I were to describe Font Awesome in a word, I think it would be...awesome.  The icon font library is massively helpful in using quality vector glyphs instead of  separate images.  I tend to use a lot of icons within links, as they help users to more quickly visually identify navigation.  One side effect of using icons within links is that the icons themselves now use the text-decoration of the link.  I really don't want icons underlined like the link -- it looks tacky.  Here's how I remove them!

The CSS

Using the root icon selector and :before, we can adjust the icon's display and text-decoration:

i[class^="icon-"]:before {
	display: inline-block;
	text-decoration: none;
}

Needing this snippet to avoid text-decoration is a recent change as Font Awesome originally used the above styles.  Keep this CSS code handy if you use Font Awesome!

Recent Features

  • By
    Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS

    CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more.  I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...

  • By
    JavaScript Promise API

    While synchronous code is easier to follow and debug, async is generally better for performance and flexibility. Why "hold up the show" when you can trigger numerous requests at once and then handle them when each is ready?  Promises are becoming a big part of the JavaScript world...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Instagram For MooTools

    If you're still rocking an iPhone and fancy taking a photo every now and then, you'd be crazy not to be using an app called Instagram.  With Instagram you take the photos just as you would with your native iPhone camera app, but Instagram...

  • By
    CSS Sprites

    The idea of CSS sprites is pretty genius. For those of you who don't know the idea of a sprite, a sprite is basically multiple graphics compiled into one image. The advantages of using sprites are: Fewer images for the browser to download, which means...

Discussion

  1. Thanks for the snippet, I had the same issue and got to the same solution but was concerned about its performance.

    Anything you can say on this matter?

    • I can’t imagine this causing performance issues…

  2. Mircea

    Performance issues?

    p { color: #fff; } – my eight-core cpu is going full-load when renders this!

    WHAT A TWIST!

  3. Brandon

    Thanks for the tip. Here’s another similar service that’s amazing as well: http://icomoon.io/

  4. Does this still fix IE10? It’s broken for me. :(

  5. Stephen you might need to use

    i[class^="fa"]:before {
  6. Ah thanks! That one was driving me nuts. Didn’t think to try inline-block – i’ll get some more sleep tonight thanks to you :)

  7. nonsaprei

    Thanks, this trick worked for me even in 2020 with Font Awesome 5.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!