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> It's a cute idea, but I found it more annoying to use in practice. Agreed. Looks very nice in editor, but programming is not about looks. It's about ease of

> It's a cute idea, but I found it more annoying to use in practice. Agreed. Looks very nice in editor, but programming is not about looks. It's about ease of editing and maintainability.

matwood 3y ago
> It's about ease of editing and maintainability. What if ligatures makes it easier to edit and maintain? I assume you only use light mode and the system fixed font for your programming?
- recursive 3y ago
  Not who you asked, but I use dark mode in VS Code and Sublime usually. But those are the defaults. I do use default fonts. I generally don't change defaults. However. If ligatures were turned on by default, I would turn them off.
- worksonmine 3y ago
  Ligatures seem like the light theme in your analogy. I do NOT want my code looking one way in the editor, and another when reading PRs on the web. Consistency is king, and this just feels like bells and whistles some designer came up with. Same reason one uses spaces over tabs, except in Makefiles because someone decided tabs are mandatory. With spaces copying the code from one place to another doesn't change the indentation too much. I'm sure I would get used to it after a while, but right now I'm having trouble even reading the examples. I don't need my editor to be too special.
  - WorldMaker 3y ago
    > I do NOT want my code looking one way in the editor, and another when reading PRs on the web. Some PR tools let you select your font. I think more should. For one example on the web today, you can use github.dev (shortcut '.' on the github.com page for the PR) to open GitHub PRs in the web version of VS Code, which will Settings Sync, including font choice, with your regular VS Code profile. (Though, of course, that uses the GitHub Issues and Pull Requests extension to provide PR tools, and you can also just install that same extension locally into VS Code and never visit the web in the first place and just use VS Code for PR reviews if you like.)
    - worksonmine 3y ago
      Sounds cool, but I'm comfortable in vim. I'm curious though, what black magic does it use to sync the web to my local dotfiles? Or does VS Code have cloud accounts now?
      - WorldMaker 3y ago
        It does support a cloud-based sync tied to either your GitHub account and/or Microsoft account. If you prefer a more traditional git-based dotfiles sync, github.dev and GitHub Code Spaces will also look for a public or private repo under your account called dotfiles. I don't think vscode.dev has a way to provide a dotfiles repo, though, and I think it only supports the cloud sync. (vscode.dev is the other web hosted VS Code like github.dev but for other generic things like its Theme Playground and a subset of github.dev functionality for Azure Repos missing things like PR review support because there is no equivalent extension to GitHub Issues and Pull Requests for Azure Repos.)
        worksonmine 3y ago
        So what you're suggesting is vendor lock-in to solve my goal of consistency independent of context? What about Gitlab, Slack, mailing-lists? And the killer feature for losing that is ligature support? I do have dotfiles repo but no VSCode stuff there, and no Microsoft account, might explain why I never got past the "setting up your web editor" screen when I tried the '.' shortcut.
        WorldMaker 3y ago
        I'm not suggesting vendor lock-in is necessary which is exactly why I mentioned there were multiple ways to do that. I think it is great to have options. It was also just one example I knew of where code review tools were getting more respectful of user preferences. I stated pretty plainly that I wish a lot more tools were doing that beyond the examples that I knew. I'd love to see more font options in code review tools. I don't know about Gitlab and the last I used Slack I had wished it had font options because I hated whatever fonts they chose that they thought aligned best with their brand. Mailing lists are actually an easy answer: use a mail client that happily lets you switch an email's fonts. (I used to do that when reading code in mailing lists in Thunderbird to switch from the default proportional fonts of email to a monotype font and back. I assume Thunderbird still has features like that, but it has been forever since I've personally been on a mailing list involving code reviewing.)
WorldMaker 3y ago
The ancient Python maxim is "Code is read a lot more than it is written" and I've always found that to be true. Looking nice is a benefit to readability. Readability is a key part of maintainability (you have to find what you are about to edit first). I find that I'm more likely to catch simple mistakes with ligatures than without, which is also a boon to editing/maintainability. (For example of that, in JS/TS development Fira Code's === ligature isn't just wider, but has an entire third extra line in the vertical stack, making it in my opinion far easier to spot.)

> It's a cute idea, but I found it more annoying to use in practice. Agreed. Looks very nice in editor, but programming is not about looks. It's about ease of editing and maintainability.

matwood 3y ago

> It's about ease of editing and maintainability. What if ligatures makes it easier to edit and maintain? I assume you only use light mode and the system fixed font for your programming?

recursive 3y ago
Not who you asked, but I use dark mode in VS Code and Sublime usually. But those are the defaults. I do use default fonts. I generally don't change defaults. However. If ligatures were turned on by default, I would turn them off.
worksonmine 3y ago
Ligatures seem like the light theme in your analogy. I do NOT want my code looking one way in the editor, and another when reading PRs on the web. Consistency is king, and this just feels like bells and whistles some designer came up with. Same reason one uses spaces over tabs, except in Makefiles because someone decided tabs are mandatory. With spaces copying the code from one place to another doesn't change the indentation too much. I'm sure I would get used to it after a while, but right now I'm having trouble even reading the examples. I don't need my editor to be too special.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  > I do NOT want my code looking one way in the editor, and another when reading PRs on the web. Some PR tools let you select your font. I think more should. For one example on the web today, you can use github.dev (shortcut '.' on the github.com page for the PR) to open GitHub PRs in the web version of VS Code, which will Settings Sync, including font choice, with your regular VS Code profile. (Though, of course, that uses the GitHub Issues and Pull Requests extension to provide PR tools, and you can also just install that same extension locally into VS Code and never visit the web in the first place and just use VS Code for PR reviews if you like.)
  - worksonmine 3y ago
    Sounds cool, but I'm comfortable in vim. I'm curious though, what black magic does it use to sync the web to my local dotfiles? Or does VS Code have cloud accounts now?
    - WorldMaker 3y ago
      It does support a cloud-based sync tied to either your GitHub account and/or Microsoft account. If you prefer a more traditional git-based dotfiles sync, github.dev and GitHub Code Spaces will also look for a public or private repo under your account called dotfiles. I don't think vscode.dev has a way to provide a dotfiles repo, though, and I think it only supports the cloud sync. (vscode.dev is the other web hosted VS Code like github.dev but for other generic things like its Theme Playground and a subset of github.dev functionality for Azure Repos missing things like PR review support because there is no equivalent extension to GitHub Issues and Pull Requests for Azure Repos.)
      - worksonmine 3y ago
        So what you're suggesting is vendor lock-in to solve my goal of consistency independent of context? What about Gitlab, Slack, mailing-lists? And the killer feature for losing that is ligature support? I do have dotfiles repo but no VSCode stuff there, and no Microsoft account, might explain why I never got past the "setting up your web editor" screen when I tried the '.' shortcut.
        WorldMaker 3y ago
        I'm not suggesting vendor lock-in is necessary which is exactly why I mentioned there were multiple ways to do that. I think it is great to have options. It was also just one example I knew of where code review tools were getting more respectful of user preferences. I stated pretty plainly that I wish a lot more tools were doing that beyond the examples that I knew. I'd love to see more font options in code review tools. I don't know about Gitlab and the last I used Slack I had wished it had font options because I hated whatever fonts they chose that they thought aligned best with their brand. Mailing lists are actually an easy answer: use a mail client that happily lets you switch an email's fonts. (I used to do that when reading code in mailing lists in Thunderbird to switch from the default proportional fonts of email to a monotype font and back. I assume Thunderbird still has features like that, but it has been forever since I've personally been on a mailing list involving code reviewing.)

WorldMaker 3y ago

The ancient Python maxim is "Code is read a lot more than it is written" and I've always found that to be true. Looking nice is a benefit to readability. Readability is a key part of maintainability (you have to find what you are about to edit first). I find that I'm more likely to catch simple mistakes with ligatures than without, which is also a boon to editing/maintainability. (For example of that, in JS/TS development Fira Code's === ligature isn't just wider, but has an entire third extra line in the vertical stack, making it in my opinion far easier to spot.)