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I've witness many a question after/during technical slides where the audience was confused by symbols. At a bare minimum, don't use ligatures in slides or blog
by toastal 3y ago
I've witness many a question after/during technical slides where the audience was confused by symbols. At a bare minimum, don't use ligatures in slides or blog posts or anything meant for a broad audience.
Ideally, languages would support Unicode as well so you can mean what you say when you type—some folks will naturally prefer this to “keyboard-compatible” options and this should be fine (though ask many non-Anglophone users where the `$` key is and they won't be able to tell you). With Vim digraphs, Kitty unicode input, extra layers on a keyboard… there are many ways to tackle the ‘input hard’ problem. A good example of this is Dhall where Unicode is optional, but could be enforced with a built-in formatter option.
- JoshTriplett 3y agoThe initial presentation of Kotlin at Google I/O used fonts with ligatures. As a result, many people in the audience were confused about what the actual syntax of the language was.
- jeroenhd 3y agoI've personally never heard of anyone having a problem with my ligature preferences (other than "they're weird"). People know ≠ and != mean the same thing. But a presentation introducing syntax? That's just silly. I can't believe someone would get that wrong.
- petesergeant 3y ago> At a bare minimum, don't use ligatures in slides or blog posts or anything meant for a broad audience This seems a much more reasonable take
- throwawaymaths 3y ago> slides or blog posts or anything meant for a broad audience. Or if you're screensharing while pairing, or if a coworker is looking over your shoulder when you're sharing something, or...
- toastal 3y agoTBH, remote pairing in my experience is best done with a tool like upterm or tmate so the user can bring their own terminal toolbox (fonts, colors, settings) and it saves a lot of bandwidth too while remaining crisp, especially when text becomes compressed and hard to read.
- throwawaymaths 3y agoWell not all your coworkers will have that especially if you're not a place that does pairing all the time but just as one-offs.
- toastal 3y ago$ nix-shell -p tmate --command tmate Now they have it for a one-off
- conradludgate 3y agoerror: nix-shell command not found
- toastal 3y agoOh you need something more modern, np $ nix shell nixpkgs#tmate --command tmate
- s-lambert 3y agoYou could alternatively use VSCode Live Share which is pretty similar.
- toastal 3y agoThis isn’t a viable option because a) it forces a specific editor on users and b) it’s buying into Microsoft’s proprietary ecosystem (tracking, plugins, etc.).