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Comment by zenlot | Hacker News Reader

Not related to this awesome font, but is it just me who doesn't like fonts ligatures? I'd much rather see !=, than crossed =.

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Ligatures are amazing, I don't understand why anyone would like ascii "compound versions" of a set of symbols when there are thousands if not many hundreds of thousands of great symbols that were used in older typographic settings that are available for usage.

A few reasons I don't like ligatures when coding:

- It makes me have to think too hard to figure out where the boundaries actually lie between characters when I want to edit. I don't want to think about how many times I'll have to press backspace to delete a single "character"; without ligatures, I don't have to think at all. - With ligatures enabled, I have to remember how to type each character-group (e.g., that != is the same as slashed equals). With ligatures disabled, I can just read it back from an existing example. In other words, ligatures create a separation between what I type and what I see. - It makes it hard to quickly compare my code to examples online that don't use the ligatures because, again, I'm forced to translate between what's on my screen and what's in the file.

The only ligatures I appreciate are minor stylistic ones, e.g., raising a colon slightly before a number, adjusting the spacing between two consecutive colons, raising two consecutive asterisks, etc. Changes that don't fundamentally change the code appears but make it a teensy bit more aesthetically pleasing.

Your last point on minor changes make a lot of sense. Are there any fonts that do this?

I use Iosevka with just the "kern-dotty" ligatures enabled.

I am with you. When you are inverting your logic and need to delete the ! out of != but you have the ligature version you are prone to making a mistake. Best case, you notice it. Worst case you don’t and create a subtle bug.

How would you make a subtle mistake while turning != into = due to ligatures?

var a, b = true; if (a!=b) console.assert(false, "unreachable");

just aim for the middle of the "=/=". Click right where the vertical line is

I personally like font ligatures, but I'd much rather have true Unicode "synonyms". E.g why shouldn't `!=` and `≠` be synonymous tokens?

This would have to be at the language level, surely. Even comparing "case" is filled with weird complexity, comparing equality in this way seems fraught.

Absolutely, my ideal would be for the canonical form in the codebase to just be the abstract token. It would have one or more possible names stored in the codebase. Then each developer would be able to choose the names they'd prefer to see and type in their editors. (Decoupling the name of a code unit from the actual reference to/implementation of it is one of the things I'm really excited about in the Unison programming language.)

That would make it extremely difficult to talk to anyone else about the code though, no?

You'd have to spend time finding and learning the "common" ground between every fellow developer you talk to.

There could be non-programming use cases where one might need to use != instead of ≠

Ligatures obscure the underlying text, which is a problem when you actually edit it. It is okay to have light ligatures where the original text is retained but refined in style but many fonts with ligatures do too much [1], like rendering `!==` as two lines and a slashed stroke in between (come on, who on earth did think this is a good idea???). I would rather have a Unicode symbol support and automatic symbol substitution instead.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DKE2QBSUQAEv_dQ.jpg

> come on, who on earth did think this is a good idea???

Me. It’s the 21th century. It’s bad enough I have to use monospaced fonts because people can’t properly tabulate. I will at least have proper symbols rather than weird combination of glyphes.

I too want proper symbols, but not ASCII approximations disguised by inconsistent ligatures.

Writing my previous comment, it suddenly downed on me that I could actually be using a proportional font with ligatures and things would look even better. I need to try.

You don't have to use a monospace font to write code.

I am not a fan of ligatures either. The "compose" key would be another option to insert various Unicode glyphs and it exists already.

Unfortunately, with monospace fonts many of these glyphs do not look nice to me due to the width constraint. Maybe a "multispace" font would be nicer while still preserving the grid alignment.

Because people can have preferences to make things work better for them, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Software engineering is one of the few professions where you can use a hammer you designed yourself that fits your hand perfectly and is optimal for the task at hand.

Changes like this don't mean you're forcing other people to use your weird shaped nails, tho.

Of course. You can use Comic Sans for programming or whatnot if you really want (and there is actually a good reason, including dyslexia). But it is generally frowned upon because the font was never designed for that purpose and its use mostly indicates that the user is clueless about typography. Likewise excessive ligatures have their places, but there is a good reason to avoid them when you frequently have to edit them.

My view: Because languages are defined as those symbols, so why obfuscate it? It would be like collapsing the letters "ch" in english to a new symbol because it's a digraph.

Isn't combining letters in natural language the original purpose of ligatures?

I think the original purpose was to clean up typography so that e.g., "fi" didn't look too cramped.

Luckily as programmers we can each use a different configuration- I just spent two hours at work trying to get my ligature fonts to show up in a hosted VSCode instance.

I tend to dislike these sorts of ligatures because they obscure the underlying text that was typed. I would much prefer programming languages supported characters like "≠" or "≡" as aliases for operators.

Yeah, I’d rather these characters be implemented in-editor by replacing != with ≠

Julia does that. https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/mathematical-operati...

Mostly I find it distracting when you edit them and they magically change back and forth.

I just want to see the literal characters as well. Computers are hard enough as it is, don't need to add visual tricks into the mix.

It’s not just you. The first time I turned them on it was like “whoa, neat!” But they grew tiresome fairly quickly.

Agreed. I really love the ligatures, but not sure I'd like actually coding with them. Perhaps a quick way to enable/disable?

They look great in screenshots, but in my experience they aren’t any more readable.

I personally prefer them and find them easier to read, but have been using them for the past 2-3 years.

I love ligatures, for what it's worth. I find them nicer to look at than the separate char versions, and I've not found them to be distracting or confusing.

Yes, I hate ligatures. I want to know exactly what sequence of characters exist in a file, not transformed into another symbol.

I used to like them, but one time I wasted 15 minutes on trying to split → into - and > before I realised I have them on, so I hate them now too.

In principle I agree that there's issues with ligature fonts, but I tried using one for a few months a while back and found that in practice I didn't find myself having to think more about what the underlying text actually was, and it was occasionally delightful to look at the pretty symbols.

On the whole I think they're nice.

Plus one for the dislike camp. That vim calls them “conceal characters” gives me a bit of a chuckle for some reason.

You're not alone. :)

I don't either, never did, never will.

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