> The problem is that ligature substitution is “dumb” in the sense that it only considers whether certain characters appear in a certain order. It’s not aware o

> The problem is that ligature substitution is “dumb” in the sense that it only considers whether certain characters appear in a certain order. It’s not aware of the semantic context. At least in Sublime Text this is not true. We tokenize the text according to the rules in the syntax definition and then pass characters to be shaped, but respecting token boundaries. In fact, we’ve fielded a number of bug reports about ligatures not working, and it is almost always that the syntax definition was tokenizing the = and the > as separate tokens. We also made the decision to only pass runs of symbols to the text shaping engine, as opposed to runs of alphanumeric characters. This prevents ligatures like fl that are usually not useful in a monospace layout such as a text editor. There are also options to control the OpenType features for ligature fine tuning.