Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

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!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools & Printing – Creating a Links Table of Contents

    One detail we sometimes forget when considering print for websites is that the user cannot see the URLs of links when the page prints. While showing link URLs isn't always important, some websites could greatly benefit from doing so. This tutorial will show you...

  • By
    prefers-color-scheme: CSS Media Query

    One device and app feature I've come to appreciate is the ability to change between light and dark modes. If you've ever done late night coding or reading, you know how amazing a dark theme can be for preventing eye strain and the headaches that result.

Discussion

  1. Eliazer

    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?

    • David Walsh

      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. Stephen Bateman

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

  5. nick

    Stephen you might need to use 

    i[class^="fa"]:before {
  6. Robin

    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!