2 ms·

I find ligatures increase the difficulty of communicating/collaborating with other developers. When working through a problem together in a screenshare, or at

I find ligatures increase the difficulty of communicating/collaborating with other developers. When working through a problem together in a screenshare, or at their machine, having to visually parse what they're displaying creates a speedbump in my head as I have to pause and translate. Some ligatures are not too bad, easily discernible, but some are particularly egregious. The worst offenders tend to be anything involving '!' and '=' and the many varying stylistic interpretations of it. It appears that font designers are in a race to outdo each other, or introduce it for the 'coolness' factor and eschewing the practicalities involved. But I don't want to be a grump and I do keep trying out ligature fonts every now and again, always with negative results.

usrusr 5y ago
"Is this a ligature or is it a homoglyph attack" is certainly a waste of cycles that nobody should have to endure. (why am I thinking of Scala all of a sudden, Scala has done nothing wrong!) Perhaps if some radical homoglyph defenses get established they could also take this sting out of ligatures? (how about highlighting everything that cannot be typed with your current keyboard layout, or with the layouts in whatever quick access scheme you might have?)
jonnycomputer 5y ago
Hmm. Yeah, I really don't think I like != ligature. I don't want to mistake it for some non-ascii unicode symbol, and I generally like what I type to stay the way I typed it (including curly quotes!). Yeah, no thank you. Also, I notice that Jetbrains Mono doesn't ligature ~= as !=, but that is what it means in Matlab. So it really seems like assumptions about language semantics is baked in to the font. Jetbrains Mono does offer the no-ligature version.