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Comment by amake | Hacker News Reader

"Oh, a post about a programming font; let's see if there are any comments not from killjoys who can't help but advertise their hatred of ligatures"

*opens comments*

*shakes head, closes tab*

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Although what did you expect, since there isn't much else to discuss about fonts that isn't subjective. We could discuss slashed vs dotted zeros, I guess.

I like the slashes. I think they're fun and help differentiate from Os.

Can we get slashed 7s too? Maybe even slashed Zs.

When downloading Berkeley Mono, you can choose some configurations and I love the slashed 7 (as well as zero). Something feels off to me with the line but overall it’s fun to have in a font.

As long as there's something to distinguish zero from a capital letter O. I'm okay with the dot. I wish most typefaces made 0 more distinguishable from O.

I use Cascadia Code PL Nerd Font. What do you use?

I would like to learn how most people decide on choosing a monospace font for their code editor and terminal. Is it pure choice based on looks? Or some other things are considered?

I think you're asking which font attributes people care about.

But fwiw, there is this game-ified tool to choose fonts: https://www.codingfont.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34589338

Ordinary glyphs and ligatures (if any) are generally thought to be designed together. Turning ligatures off is not a proper solution but a workaround---you would be using something different from what was originally designed [1]. And sufficiently many people think most uses of ligatures in programming fonts are indeed bad, therefore those fonts are also bad, thus endless complaints.

[1] And if ligatures are designed independently from ordinary glyphs, there is no reason to make them default.

It's a monospace font. Ligatures aren't used to make sequences like 'fi' look stupid, they're used to make sequences often used for mathematical operations look like those mathematical symbols. Turning off ligatures should be completely fine in this case.

I haven't experienced an application that didn't require me to explicitly turn them on.

Given how many choices there are for monospace/coding fonts, it seems hardly worth making a fuss over. Use it if you like it, use something else if you don't.

That sort of reasonableness could be considered Blasphemy on the net.

This is HN after all

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