7 ms·

More and more often, I see ligatures being used on such fonts. E.g. === or != are combined in a visually single character. Personally, I don't like that at all

by uallo 6y ago

More and more often, I see ligatures being used on such fonts. E.g. === or != are combined in a visually single character. Personally, I don't like that at all as I think it makes code less readable. It is probably something that you can get used to. But what exactly is the appeal of it anyway?

antihero 6y ago
Well I guess the idea is that the ligatures represent the concepts that the combination of symbols are trying to represent. Also it looks pretty If you're staring a text editor for 8+ hours a day, it is important what you are staring at is pleasing to you.
- throwanem 6y ago
  I'll be honest, I've never grasped the perspective that sees typography as a meaningful aesthetic property of code. I mean, when I look at code, I'm not appreciating it as visual art, I'm reading it. Usually the point at which that stops happening is the point at which my brain is tired enough that it's time to go do something else for a little while and recover. So, as long as the font I'm using doesn't actively impair legibility, which is a pretty low baseline, it doesn't really matter - and in any case, if it's a visual aesthetic I want, I'll go do it in Illustrator where I can actually have precise control over every aspect of that aesthetic, instead of forcing my programming environment to double as an installation art piece. (DejaVu Sans Mono, in case anyone cares, or Menlo on Apple hardware since it doesn't want installing. Haven't changed it in what must be close to a couple decades by now; somebody sneakernetted me a copy of Vera Sans Mono in my earliest days of moving up from the helpdesk and I never looked back. Doesn't changing fonts impose a cognitive overhead of its own for a while?) ...all of which is to say I favor brutalism, I guess.
  - actionscripted 6y ago
    If you're working on code for most of the day, you will absolutely be making decisions that enhance your experience. Could be an editor, monitor, chair, etc. It might not seem like some of those little things matter -- if I can sit in the chair, it works for me! -- but they do to some and typography is one of those things. I don't understand folks who don't understand this. I get it if you don't personally care about typography but every developer is making QOL decisions.
    - throwanem 6y ago
      I mean sure, I get that it's a QoL thing and that some people care more than others - I'm not arguing it shouldn't matter to anyone, so much as saying I have trouble grasping what specifically about it does make it matter to those who value it highly, I guess.
fyhn 6y ago
For instance != is just a way to write something that looks similar to ≠. With ligatures, you can actually see the symbol you're representing, and not an approximation. I suppose that is the appeal. And it looks neat.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  > With ligatures, you can actually see the symbol you're representing, and not an approximation. I think the flip side (which is why many people don't like them) is that with ligatures you can't see the actual code that you've written, only an approximation.
  - yoz-y 6y ago
    When I'm reading the code I need to understand what it does, the underlying characters are just a medium. I can see way quicker that a complex boolean expression is wrong when I see ≠ instead of != and ⪖ instead of >=. I do agree with the Butterick that when presenting code to others, for example as examples, the ligatures are a big no, because in this case you actually need to see what characters you need to input.
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      In that case it works reasonably well, but how do you represent the difference between `=`, `==` and `===` in javascript. IMO =, == and === is much clearer and more visually distinct than ≔, = and ≡.
      - yoz-y 6y ago
        Mainly a force of habit. But I agree that for equalities a split sign would be clearer for most people. I won't be going around and trying to convince people to use or not use ligatures though. I feel that it is a very personal preference much like the choice of syntax colouring theme.
      - hydroxideOH- 6y ago
        I never use == in any circumstance anyway, but telling the difference between the == and === ligatures are really not hard. The === one, at least with JetBrains Mono, is much larger.
sondr3 6y ago
It looks pretty, that was at least the reason I started using it. And now I’m so used to them that I can’t live without them, and I don’t get the “less readable” argument. Most of the fonts make the ligature the same width as the underlying characters, just making them look prettier. My font of choice, PragmataPro [0], has both variants with and without ligatures if you so desire. [0]: https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/ https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/
- rpastuszak 6y ago
  How much did you pay for it? I love typography but this looks quite pricey
  - iruoy 6y ago
    An alternative that looks a lot like this one is Iosevka[0]. My favorite programming fonts are PragmataPro, Iosevka and Jetbrains Mono. In that order. I used to use PragmataPro for everything, but I use Iosevka for everything but my IDE these days. [0]: https://typeof.net/Iosevka/ https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
  - nicky0 6y ago
    It's $19 if you just pick the regular weight desktop version.
  - sondr3 6y ago
    I paid the full price for it (€199), and I've found it to be a worthwhile purchase. It's pay-once-use-forever and since I spend a lot of time staring at code, the price per day of use is very low. Of course, there are free fonts that do the same and look good, I used Iosevka and Fira Code before I found PragmataPro. Honestly, I just adore how the font looks, and that was the primary reason I bought it, the others being the amount of available characters and that the author is a paid professional working on it.
    - zingplex 6y ago
      The thing that made the difference for me is the hinting, it's an absolute game changer on lower resolution screens.
ldjb 6y ago
I suppose some might say the code looks cleaner with ligatures and they better convey the meaning of the code (e.g. ≠ is easier to understand than !=). Personally, however, I like to see exactly what it is I am typing, exactly which symbols are being used. Ligatures distort that. Ligatures are fine when reading prose, but I find them too confusing when coding. That's a personal preference, though. I'm sure some people have no problem with them. I expect a significant proportion of programmers do not like coding using fonts with ligatures, so it's interesting that this website only provides the ability to filter fonts to display only those with ligatures. I would have liked the option to only display fonts WITHOUT ligatures.
- robertbalent 6y ago
  I believe all of these fonts can be used without ligatures. If I want to use ligatures, I have to explicitly enable it in my code editor.
- RobertKerans 6y ago
  That's not how ligatures work. You have to explicitly turn open type features on, they aren't automatic. They are additions to the character set. Edit: Unless your reason for checking is that you explicitly want a marginally smaller file (possibly just at bytes level) to download (in which case just use one of the many online tools providing subsetting to strip unicode ranges and do something like remove everything except basic ascii?) there's no real point filtering for fonts without ligatures because, practically, that's just all of them
- throwaway2245 6y ago
  > ≠ is easier to understand than != I respectfully disagree with this claim. It's conventional code notation that != is a Boolean test for (in)equality; that convention doesn't apply to ≠, which is overloaded in mathematics.
  - kps 6y ago
    It's C notation. Other languages use other notations like ~= or /= or <>. And any conceptual overloading of ≠ is a tiny fraction of the problem with = (it's too bad ASCII'67 dropped the ASCII'63 ← in favor of _).
lucideer 6y ago
> But what exactly is the appeal of it anyway? To answer this question you probably need to start broader with: why do ligatures exist in fonts at all? Then see if that applies to programming. There's various accounts of the "reasons" ligatures came to be, but of the few I've seen all would (imo) apply equally to code as to language. The obvious one is pure aesthetic preference, but another is that ligatures came about as a way for business people of the time to differentiate letter/symbol-combinations for single repetitious use (as is done for operands: e.g. `===` has a single semantic meaning, it does not represent 3 programmatic operations in a row). All in all though, I would guess this is about aesthetics mostly. My own personal preference is to use ligatures in presenting code and avoid them in text editors/IDEs. I think this fits with traditional font use (writers would hand-write or typewrite manuscripts, ligatures would only be used by publishers/printers). It's possible presented code may "suffer" in readability for some unaccustomed to ligatures, so there's a trade-off to consider, but that's also true of books/articles using ligatures in natural language, and I think the problem is overstated in both cases. The nice thing is that copypasting the code doesn't force retention of the ligatures.
- Measter 6y ago
  Why would copy-pasting force retention of ligatures? Ligatures don't change the underlying characters, only the graphical representation of them.
  - lucideer 6y ago
    It doesn't. That's what I said.
    - Measter 6y ago
      Ah, so you did. My apologies, I misread.
- fimdomeio 6y ago
  In typography there are ligatures that exist because they help readability (ex: ff fi tt) and others that are pure ornamental (ex: st). Personaly I see coding ligatures as ornamental as I can't read === faster if all the lines are merged because I need a precision in the meaning of this symbols that I wouldn't need if I was reading text where I can use, - – — (minus, en dash, em dash) and while it might look a little off no one would lost the intended meaning.
lpellis 6y ago
I sort of get the point, but a lot of these fonts squash together == to look like a long =, making it really hard to distinguish == from === Can you tell from 'Iosevka Slab' that it is a triple equal sign?
- NeutronStar 6y ago
  Losevka has the option of setting the === ligature with 3 lines instead of 2.
indymike 6y ago
I decided to try out ligatures a couple days ago. After about 5 minutes of getting oriented, I liked it better. The whole = == === thing ended up working out as a short = a long = and a three bar (giant hamburger?) were a lot easier to spot than the individual characters side-by-side. != turned into a double-width not equals symbol. So, 50% fun and 50% practical.
Timpy 6y ago
I usually really enjoy customizing my shell and making it look pretty, but my first experience with ligatures was a bad one. I was learning LaTeX and my editor turned on ligatures for me (I think the vim-polyglot plugin was the culprit) and it was very frustrating. Ligatures in an unfamiliar environment make it harder to follow guides and learn from the code that you're reading. Maybe it would be a lot easier if I was using it in my native language, but it just struck me as an abstraction and one more thing to learn and keep track of.
slmjkdbtl 6y ago
I consider editor not showing or changing what you exactly type as rude (I can accept autocompletion because it at least prompts). It also introduce a ton of (unnecessary) complexity on top of the text formatting system, which in most cases are already a mess.
corytheboyd 6y ago
I’m with you. It’s source code, and as such I prefer seeing... well, only the source. I don’t get why it’s so polarizing, it seems obvious to me haha
meowface 6y ago
At first I hated them and thought they were pointless and weird, but now I'm so used to them that it feels a little off if I don't see them. It helps to visually parse things a tiny bit more quickly, I think. And it makes things more aesthetically pleasing, for me. Combined symbols like == and <= really are unique, independent things that make logical sense as their own separate units.

by uallo 6y ago

antihero 6y ago

Well I guess the idea is that the ligatures represent the concepts that the combination of symbols are trying to represent. Also it looks pretty If you're staring a text editor for 8+ hours a day, it is important what you are staring at is pleasing to you.

throwanem 6y ago
I'll be honest, I've never grasped the perspective that sees typography as a meaningful aesthetic property of code. I mean, when I look at code, I'm not appreciating it as visual art, I'm reading it. Usually the point at which that stops happening is the point at which my brain is tired enough that it's time to go do something else for a little while and recover. So, as long as the font I'm using doesn't actively impair legibility, which is a pretty low baseline, it doesn't really matter - and in any case, if it's a visual aesthetic I want, I'll go do it in Illustrator where I can actually have precise control over every aspect of that aesthetic, instead of forcing my programming environment to double as an installation art piece. (DejaVu Sans Mono, in case anyone cares, or Menlo on Apple hardware since it doesn't want installing. Haven't changed it in what must be close to a couple decades by now; somebody sneakernetted me a copy of Vera Sans Mono in my earliest days of moving up from the helpdesk and I never looked back. Doesn't changing fonts impose a cognitive overhead of its own for a while?) ...all of which is to say I favor brutalism, I guess.
- actionscripted 6y ago
  If you're working on code for most of the day, you will absolutely be making decisions that enhance your experience. Could be an editor, monitor, chair, etc. It might not seem like some of those little things matter -- if I can sit in the chair, it works for me! -- but they do to some and typography is one of those things. I don't understand folks who don't understand this. I get it if you don't personally care about typography but every developer is making QOL decisions.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    I mean sure, I get that it's a QoL thing and that some people care more than others - I'm not arguing it shouldn't matter to anyone, so much as saying I have trouble grasping what specifically about it does make it matter to those who value it highly, I guess.

fyhn 6y ago

For instance != is just a way to write something that looks similar to ≠. With ligatures, you can actually see the symbol you're representing, and not an approximation. I suppose that is the appeal. And it looks neat.

nicoburns 6y ago
> With ligatures, you can actually see the symbol you're representing, and not an approximation. I think the flip side (which is why many people don't like them) is that with ligatures you can't see the actual code that you've written, only an approximation.
- yoz-y 6y ago
  When I'm reading the code I need to understand what it does, the underlying characters are just a medium. I can see way quicker that a complex boolean expression is wrong when I see ≠ instead of != and ⪖ instead of >=. I do agree with the Butterick that when presenting code to others, for example as examples, the ligatures are a big no, because in this case you actually need to see what characters you need to input.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    In that case it works reasonably well, but how do you represent the difference between `=`, `==` and `===` in javascript. IMO =, == and === is much clearer and more visually distinct than ≔, = and ≡.
    - yoz-y 6y ago
      Mainly a force of habit. But I agree that for equalities a split sign would be clearer for most people. I won't be going around and trying to convince people to use or not use ligatures though. I feel that it is a very personal preference much like the choice of syntax colouring theme.
    - hydroxideOH- 6y ago
      I never use == in any circumstance anyway, but telling the difference between the == and === ligatures are really not hard. The === one, at least with JetBrains Mono, is much larger.

sondr3 6y ago

It looks pretty, that was at least the reason I started using it. And now I’m so used to them that I can’t live without them, and I don’t get the “less readable” argument. Most of the fonts make the ligature the same width as the underlying characters, just making them look prettier. My font of choice, PragmataPro [0], has both variants with and without ligatures if you so desire. [0]: https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/ https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/

rpastuszak 6y ago
How much did you pay for it? I love typography but this looks quite pricey
- iruoy 6y ago
  An alternative that looks a lot like this one is Iosevka[0]. My favorite programming fonts are PragmataPro, Iosevka and Jetbrains Mono. In that order. I used to use PragmataPro for everything, but I use Iosevka for everything but my IDE these days. [0]: https://typeof.net/Iosevka/ https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
- nicky0 6y ago
  It's $19 if you just pick the regular weight desktop version.
- sondr3 6y ago
  I paid the full price for it (€199), and I've found it to be a worthwhile purchase. It's pay-once-use-forever and since I spend a lot of time staring at code, the price per day of use is very low. Of course, there are free fonts that do the same and look good, I used Iosevka and Fira Code before I found PragmataPro. Honestly, I just adore how the font looks, and that was the primary reason I bought it, the others being the amount of available characters and that the author is a paid professional working on it.
  - zingplex 6y ago
    The thing that made the difference for me is the hinting, it's an absolute game changer on lower resolution screens.

ldjb 6y ago

I suppose some might say the code looks cleaner with ligatures and they better convey the meaning of the code (e.g. ≠ is easier to understand than !=). Personally, however, I like to see exactly what it is I am typing, exactly which symbols are being used. Ligatures distort that. Ligatures are fine when reading prose, but I find them too confusing when coding. That's a personal preference, though. I'm sure some people have no problem with them. I expect a significant proportion of programmers do not like coding using fonts with ligatures, so it's interesting that this website only provides the ability to filter fonts to display only those with ligatures. I would have liked the option to only display fonts WITHOUT ligatures.

robertbalent 6y ago
I believe all of these fonts can be used without ligatures. If I want to use ligatures, I have to explicitly enable it in my code editor.
RobertKerans 6y ago
That's not how ligatures work. You have to explicitly turn open type features on, they aren't automatic. They are additions to the character set. Edit: Unless your reason for checking is that you explicitly want a marginally smaller file (possibly just at bytes level) to download (in which case just use one of the many online tools providing subsetting to strip unicode ranges and do something like remove everything except basic ascii?) there's no real point filtering for fonts without ligatures because, practically, that's just all of them
throwaway2245 6y ago
> ≠ is easier to understand than != I respectfully disagree with this claim. It's conventional code notation that != is a Boolean test for (in)equality; that convention doesn't apply to ≠, which is overloaded in mathematics.
- kps 6y ago
  It's C notation. Other languages use other notations like ~= or /= or <>. And any conceptual overloading of ≠ is a tiny fraction of the problem with = (it's too bad ASCII'67 dropped the ASCII'63 ← in favor of _).

lucideer 6y ago

> But what exactly is the appeal of it anyway? To answer this question you probably need to start broader with: why do ligatures exist in fonts at all? Then see if that applies to programming. There's various accounts of the "reasons" ligatures came to be, but of the few I've seen all would (imo) apply equally to code as to language. The obvious one is pure aesthetic preference, but another is that ligatures came about as a way for business people of the time to differentiate letter/symbol-combinations for single repetitious use (as is done for operands: e.g. `===` has a single semantic meaning, it does not represent 3 programmatic operations in a row). All in all though, I would guess this is about aesthetics mostly. My own personal preference is to use ligatures in presenting code and avoid them in text editors/IDEs. I think this fits with traditional font use (writers would hand-write or typewrite manuscripts, ligatures would only be used by publishers/printers). It's possible presented code may "suffer" in readability for some unaccustomed to ligatures, so there's a trade-off to consider, but that's also true of books/articles using ligatures in natural language, and I think the problem is overstated in both cases. The nice thing is that copypasting the code doesn't force retention of the ligatures.

Measter 6y ago
Why would copy-pasting force retention of ligatures? Ligatures don't change the underlying characters, only the graphical representation of them.
- lucideer 6y ago
  It doesn't. That's what I said.
  - Measter 6y ago
    Ah, so you did. My apologies, I misread.
fimdomeio 6y ago
In typography there are ligatures that exist because they help readability (ex: ff fi tt) and others that are pure ornamental (ex: st). Personaly I see coding ligatures as ornamental as I can't read === faster if all the lines are merged because I need a precision in the meaning of this symbols that I wouldn't need if I was reading text where I can use, - – — (minus, en dash, em dash) and while it might look a little off no one would lost the intended meaning.

lpellis 6y ago

I sort of get the point, but a lot of these fonts squash together == to look like a long =, making it really hard to distinguish == from === Can you tell from 'Iosevka Slab' that it is a triple equal sign?

NeutronStar 6y ago
Losevka has the option of setting the === ligature with 3 lines instead of 2.

indymike 6y ago

I decided to try out ligatures a couple days ago. After about 5 minutes of getting oriented, I liked it better. The whole = == === thing ended up working out as a short = a long = and a three bar (giant hamburger?) were a lot easier to spot than the individual characters side-by-side. != turned into a double-width not equals symbol. So, 50% fun and 50% practical.

Timpy 6y ago

I usually really enjoy customizing my shell and making it look pretty, but my first experience with ligatures was a bad one. I was learning LaTeX and my editor turned on ligatures for me (I think the vim-polyglot plugin was the culprit) and it was very frustrating. Ligatures in an unfamiliar environment make it harder to follow guides and learn from the code that you're reading. Maybe it would be a lot easier if I was using it in my native language, but it just struck me as an abstraction and one more thing to learn and keep track of.

slmjkdbtl 6y ago

I consider editor not showing or changing what you exactly type as rude (I can accept autocompletion because it at least prompts). It also introduce a ton of (unnecessary) complexity on top of the text formatting system, which in most cases are already a mess.

corytheboyd 6y ago

I’m with you. It’s source code, and as such I prefer seeing... well, only the source. I don’t get why it’s so polarizing, it seems obvious to me haha

meowface 6y ago

At first I hated them and thought they were pointless and weird, but now I'm so used to them that it feels a little off if I don't see them. It helps to visually parse things a tiny bit more quickly, I think. And it makes things more aesthetically pleasing, for me. Combined symbols like == and <= really are unique, independent things that make logical sense as their own separate units.