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Comment by b0rsuk | Hacker News Reader

I don't see ligatures solving any important problem. If you think they do, I'd rather change syntax highlighting to recognize !== and others as a single token.

It's like multi-select in text editors. When you think about it, it's actually an inferior form of search&replace. Inferior because it interacts badly with off-screen matches. I find arguments of kakoune users unconvincing.

My personal opinion is - and I'm fine taking negative karma for this - that ligatures mostly appeal to the front-end developers among us. To the people who abuse the words "beautiful" and "gorgeous", and admire web pages which have a single text column using up 1/3 of screen width.

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> If you think they do, I'd rather change syntax highlighting to recognize !== and others as a single token.

Your syntax highlighter probably already recognizes single tokens as single tokens.

> It's like multi-select in text editors. When you think about it, it's actually an inferior form of search&replace.

I’m thinking about it, and it isn’t. Sometimes search and replace is an inferior form of multiselect. Multiselect is a less flexible form of macros, but provides immediate feedback.

> My personal opinion is - and I'm fine taking negative karma for this - that ligatures mostly appeal to the front-end developers among us. To the people who abuse the words "beautiful" and "gorgeous", and admire web pages which have a single text column using up 1/3 of screen width.

This is an unpleasant statement and apparently even you recognize that.

Some HN users love to look down on front-end development as if it's some sub-par category of developers, for some reason.

Let's do the same kind of pretentious generalization - I'd wager they are the same who think any language of higher level of abstraction than than C++ is an utter waste of time.

Edit: did I hit a nerve? I don't even believe that second statement, but it's a good example of how pretentious that comment sounded.

Sure, some do. I can't speak for them. What annoys me personally is that sometimes they seem to praise very arbitrary stylistic choices as objectively superior. I think front-end developers are more prone to fashions than other kinds of developers. The blogs seem to go through phases.

That's making a lot of assumptions. They simply might be more prone to write, read and react blog posts as a general rule. Their work is also more visible than most developers' work, being customer facing.

Gotta also keep in mind the FE landscape has radically shifted in the last 5-6 years after being almost dormant for a long while - more or less coinciding with ES2015 and the emergence of reactive frameworks ala React/Angular/Vue.

I have to agree with my sibling commenter -- you are taking a pretty strange and rather aggressive stance on this, and throwing out some ad-hominems within that.

Multi-select: Useful if I want to do a find-replace, but only within certain select results for the "find" part. If I know where they are I can use Cmd+D or multi-select to just find those quick rather than crafting a nice regex find-replace query with "only in selection" etc.

Ligatures: It's SUBJECTIVE. I dunno why you're throwing out ad hominems like "only for frontend developers who like <things I think are bad>". I am looking at code for 8-12 hours a day. If ligatures make the code nice to look at, why the heck do you care what my code looks like? My ligatures aren't being pushed into your environment.

This is like judging someone as "lesser" than you because they like a different mouse because it's comfortable for them...

> I don't see ligatures solving any important problem.

I see ligatures as solving, imperfectly, the problem of "my language has clumsy operators because it wasn't designed with support for unicode operators" lining up with the preference of "I prefer less-clumsy operators".

If you don't have the first problem then, even if your language also supports ASCII multicharacter operators, its just an autoformatter issue.

Aside from the ambiguity with similarly-appearing genuine single characters, programming ligatures tend to not really solve the problem they set out to in monospaced fonts, where you end up with a single symbol which invariably preserves the width of the ASCII multicharacter symbol, which either introduces extra empty space or extra visual weight or, often, both.

> My personal opinion is - and I'm fine taking negative karma for this - that ligatures mostly appeal to the front-end developers among us.

I've seen more praise for them from corners of the Haskell/Idris community than from the much larger front-end community. I don't think there is any real correlation between working in front-end and preferring fonts with ligatures.

This is a curious position to take given that it's mostly a personal choice. People will like what they like, and that's perfectly fine! No need to denigrate frontend devs, or anyone, for a stylistic choice.

I'm fine with people having aesthetic choices. I find front-end developers and their fashions mildly annoying.

I think this post would fit very well at /r/unixporn, similar to ASCII art, pixellated graphics or low poly models.

This is quite literally nothing but a website letting you preview how fonts look. What's "r/unixporn" about that? What a bunch of condescending baloney.

Ligatures were created to prevent crashes of overlapping bits of characters. But this is an issue that shouldn't really occur in a monospace font.

I kind of agree with your statement about multi-select, but even so, I love to use it!

(I "kind of" agree because a sibling comment is right that multi-select is a restricted form of macros, not search and replace. Because the things you can do with the multiple cursors are more than just search and replace.)

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