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Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

Looks very readable, but for me personally, ligatures for things like ->, =>, <=, >= and those weird JavaScriptisms like == vs === has really become table stakes for me.

Didn't care about that at all until about 2020, but can't imagine using a coding font without those features today.

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That’s a divisive issue. I can’t stand ligatures, personally. When I’m coding I want one text character to be one screen character.

I’m super basic regarding fonts and just look for I l 1. If you don’t absolutely nail those in fixed width then get lost.

Edit: I just noticed they doubled those up at the end. Nice touch

Yeah, nice touch. It shows they care.

To the parent, not snark, but the font is open source. You can add those ligatures!

Yep, that’s even more important than ligatures. :)

I|1l 0Oo gq S5

This kind of string should be in all the basic font examples

For sure, especially for fonts geared towards programmers and technical uses where numbers and symbols matter a great deal. A person could probably figure out that he110 is "hello" but as identifiers, he110 and hello are not interchangeable.

yeah, that's where all those huge font cataloging websites could shine (and also allow you to filter fonts based on this, eg, all zeroes should have some mark in the middle not be confused with the letter O), yet they settle on some bland pangram

Do you really need font support for that, though? I've found editor support for it much cleaner -- it knows when it's best to expand then and when they should be ligatured.

Yes! Someone has to make the glyphs and someone has to write the rules that say "unconditionally replace this sequence of glyphs with this glyph" or "in this context, replace this glyph with that one" and so on. The only thing the editor has to do is decide to use them.

They're usually grouped into features: standard ligatures (liga), discretionary ligatures (dlig), historical ligatures (hlig), contextual ligatures (clig), and so on. OpenType fonts can also provide stylistic sets, which might swap out some glyphs with alternatives.

kitty terminal has this feature! so, my vim has it by proxy

How do you configure it?

My understanding is that both font and editor must support it; the editor must know when/how to render the ligatures, but the font must define what the glyphs look like, or else they won’t look any different that the regular sequence of characters.

I’m far from an expert, though; I’ve just gotten so used to having ligatures over the past few years that I now find it uncomfortable not to have them.

Ligatures? Might as well use Comic Sans.

i for one don't think you can even call yourself a programming font if you don't have a ligature for every two-digit hexadecimal

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