3 ms·

> Code ligature thing has something to do with just seeing the characters that are actually there rather than a smokescreen, which IMO impedes editability becau

> Code ligature thing has something to do with just seeing the characters that are actually there rather than a smokescreen, which IMO impedes editability because I can't place the cursor half-way through a ligature and so on Why wouldn't that be possible? (The cursor thing) It's still two characters as far as your editor is concerned.

cnity 2y ago
I didn't say it's not possible, but certainly when I've tried ligatures in the past my editor treated it like a single character until I pressed backspace after the character (or delete before) or whatever. Anyhow there's all sorts of weird functional artefacts that just feel dodgy to me and they basically all arise from this world where multiple runes are being treated as a single one. Here are two more examples: 1. If I `/=` in vim (find equals signs), should the "!=" ligature be highlighted? If it is, then it is misrepresenting the state: if I then press delete, the highlighted ligature won't actually be removed, only part of it will be. 2. In javascript the `===` operator is less visually distinct from `==` since if there are no comparisons nearby I have to judge from the length somehow and it takes longer, adding some additional comprehension fatigue. Anyway like I said, you can probably try to fix all of these with weird special case handling but it's just fighting the underlying assumption my editor makes (and my brain has learned to understand): a source file is a list of runes. That's how I like to think about it. Anyone is free to think otherwise. They're just in that other camp and that's OK. But I don't like them personally.
- maleldil 2y ago
  A good compromise is an option from the Kitty terminal[1]: if your cursor is on top of the ligature, show the individual characters. [1] `disable_ligatures cursor`
- adrian_b 2y ago
  Among the editors which handle well ligatures is Geany. The cursor moves always over a character, regardless whether it is part of a ligature or not. You can select and delete or replace only a part of a ligature, exactly in the same way as when using a font without ligatures. The only thing that ligatures change is the visual appearance of the text, which is in my opinion an extremely useful workaround for the inertia of the legacy programming languages, which continue to use the restricted ASCII character set, which has never included all the characters that would have been needed in a programming language. Now with ligatures, we are finally able to write an ALGOL 60 program that looks like it was intended to look, 65 years ago, instead of being forced to use awkward combinations of ASCII characters, like later programmers and designers of programming languages have resigned themselves to do, because of the character set limitations that the American manufacturers of computing equipment have been unwilling to remove (causing problems not only to programmers, but also to the users of non-English languages). ASCII has never been intended to include the characters required for writing mathematical expressions. ASCII has been intended only to include the set of characters that were in use in the commercial correspondence written in English, which had been previously available in the better typewriting machines. Because of this, ASCII has always been bad as a character set used for a programming language.

cnity 2y ago

I didn't say it's not possible, but certainly when I've tried ligatures in the past my editor treated it like a single character until I pressed backspace after the character (or delete before) or whatever. Anyhow there's all sorts of weird functional artefacts that just feel dodgy to me and they basically all arise from this world where multiple runes are being treated as a single one. Here are two more examples: 1. If I `/=` in vim (find equals signs), should the "!=" ligature be highlighted? If it is, then it is misrepresenting the state: if I then press delete, the highlighted ligature won't actually be removed, only part of it will be. 2. In javascript the `===` operator is less visually distinct from `==` since if there are no comparisons nearby I have to judge from the length somehow and it takes longer, adding some additional comprehension fatigue. Anyway like I said, you can probably try to fix all of these with weird special case handling but it's just fighting the underlying assumption my editor makes (and my brain has learned to understand): a source file is a list of runes. That's how I like to think about it. Anyone is free to think otherwise. They're just in that other camp and that's OK. But I don't like them personally.

maleldil 2y ago
A good compromise is an option from the Kitty terminal[1]: if your cursor is on top of the ligature, show the individual characters. [1] `disable_ligatures cursor`
adrian_b 2y ago
Among the editors which handle well ligatures is Geany. The cursor moves always over a character, regardless whether it is part of a ligature or not. You can select and delete or replace only a part of a ligature, exactly in the same way as when using a font without ligatures. The only thing that ligatures change is the visual appearance of the text, which is in my opinion an extremely useful workaround for the inertia of the legacy programming languages, which continue to use the restricted ASCII character set, which has never included all the characters that would have been needed in a programming language. Now with ligatures, we are finally able to write an ALGOL 60 program that looks like it was intended to look, 65 years ago, instead of being forced to use awkward combinations of ASCII characters, like later programmers and designers of programming languages have resigned themselves to do, because of the character set limitations that the American manufacturers of computing equipment have been unwilling to remove (causing problems not only to programmers, but also to the users of non-English languages). ASCII has never been intended to include the characters required for writing mathematical expressions. ASCII has been intended only to include the set of characters that were in use in the commercial correspondence written in English, which had been previously available in the better typewriting machines. Because of this, ASCII has always been bad as a character set used for a programming language.