I tried to like ligature coding fonts. I really wanted to like them. Ligatures are a really cool feature of prose fonts, and often even make text more readable.

I tried to like ligature coding fonts. I really wanted to like them. Ligatures are a really cool feature of prose fonts, and often even make text more readable. And they looked cool when I first encountered them in code. But every font I’ve tried with these ligatures added cognitive load in practice. And now I find the same when I see them in code examples. Maybe there’s a way to do them “right”, where they have the same positive impact on code readability. But I haven’t found a font yet which pulls that off. I’m not a font designer, so this is just using my imagination, but I suspect they’d work better if they still left some space in the monospace grid rather than fully spanning multiple characters. Eg => looks like an arrow but with a very fine gap (1px at any size? maybe 1 device pixel on high DPI at smaller sizes?) between the characters.