4 ms·

This is a deeply personal choice, I feel. I am not a fan of using ligatures in programming code as it gives some abiguity around how many characters are in a gi

This is a deeply personal choice, I feel. I am not a fan of using ligatures in programming code as it gives some abiguity around how many characters are in a given ligature. To each his/her own, I guess.

vivekseth 9y ago
Does it? In monospaced fonts, you can use width to know how many characters are in a ligature.
- rocky1138 9y ago
  Maybe I'm just not good at it. Maybe I don't want to have to think of one more thing. That's the point of monospaced fonts, after all.
- joemi 9y ago
  The issue, at least for me, isn't that it makes it impossible to figure out how many characters a ligature is (since, as you noted, it doesn't), but that it adds some ambiguity, especially when taking a quick glance. Ambiguity can slow down parsing (in the brain) and potentially lead to errors (in the code) if I mistakenly think a ligature is a single character. For instance, in the examples from the article, the == and -> ligatures in particular look like something I might not always see as two characters.
fezz 9y ago
Solution in search of a problem.
- mixedCase 9y ago
  Aesthetics is a thing. Otherwise we wouldn't even be discussing typefaces.
derefr 9y ago
I think you're maybe confusing monospace ligatures with something else (though I'm not sure what.) In all of these programming ligature fonts, it's quite apparent how many characters a given ligature is composed of, because a ligature still consumes the horizontal width of the characters it's composed of. Look at the "!=" ligature in the Fira Code example: it's a ≠, but it clearly takes up 2em of width.
- jshap70 9y ago
  the issue is that some of the ligatures, especially the arrows, aren't as heavily towards the "clearly". I have difficulty telling the 2 character vs 3 character ones apart.
oxguy3 9y ago
My thoughts exactly. Aesthetically, I love these ligature fonts, and I think it's great if people are using these and enjoying them. But I just know that, if I used one of these fonts, I'd have to mentally convert the ligatures back into the real characters. It would use up brainspace that would be better spent on actually writing code.

vivekseth 9y ago

Does it? In monospaced fonts, you can use width to know how many characters are in a ligature.

rocky1138 9y ago
Maybe I'm just not good at it. Maybe I don't want to have to think of one more thing. That's the point of monospaced fonts, after all.
joemi 9y ago
The issue, at least for me, isn't that it makes it impossible to figure out how many characters a ligature is (since, as you noted, it doesn't), but that it adds some ambiguity, especially when taking a quick glance. Ambiguity can slow down parsing (in the brain) and potentially lead to errors (in the code) if I mistakenly think a ligature is a single character. For instance, in the examples from the article, the == and -> ligatures in particular look like something I might not always see as two characters.

fezz 9y ago

Solution in search of a problem.

mixedCase 9y ago
Aesthetics is a thing. Otherwise we wouldn't even be discussing typefaces.

derefr 9y ago

I think you're maybe confusing monospace ligatures with something else (though I'm not sure what.) In all of these programming ligature fonts, it's quite apparent how many characters a given ligature is composed of, because a ligature still consumes the horizontal width of the characters it's composed of. Look at the "!=" ligature in the Fira Code example: it's a ≠, but it clearly takes up 2em of width.

jshap70 9y ago
the issue is that some of the ligatures, especially the arrows, aren't as heavily towards the "clearly". I have difficulty telling the 2 character vs 3 character ones apart.

oxguy3 9y ago

My thoughts exactly. Aesthetically, I love these ligature fonts, and I think it's great if people are using these and enjoying them. But I just know that, if I used one of these fonts, I'd have to mentally convert the ligatures back into the real characters. It would use up brainspace that would be better spent on actually writing code.