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Comment by saclark11 | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of folks in this thread lamenting the usage of ligatures, but note that the downloaded set of font files includes a "JetBrainsMonoNL" version of all variants, which does not include ligatures ("NL", as in, "No Ligatures").

I do not like ligatures either, yet this is my favorite monospaced font. I use JetBrainsMonoNL in all the places.

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I'm starting to wonder if this is becoming spaces vs tabs. It seems silly to heavily critique a font because it supports ligatures and inversely seems silly to critique a font because it does not.

Most fonts with ligatures can be used without them anyway, making the whole thing moot

However, not all IDEs, text editors, and terminal emulators support disabling the use of ligatures, so it's often easiest to just switch to a font that doesn't include them if you don't want them.

huh, I'm surprised from searching that there isn't a quick tool to just disable ligatures given a font file. It should just be a matter of removing the ligatures in the GSUB table from the font.

Just switch the font variant to NL - no need for editor support.

Doesn't that depend on the font author providing a NL version?

e.g if you want the FiraCode improvements[1] over FiraMono without the ligatures. Without editor support, you would have to build it yourself since they don't distribute a NL version.

[1] https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode#whats-in-the-box

That's what I mean; it's often easier to use a font that doesn't have ligatures (like the NL variant) than to use a font with ligatures and hope your editor lets you disable ligatures.

I like ligatures but only when they help to remove ambiguity. For example, the ligatures for “=>” (⇒) and “>=“ (≥) are helpful because they make a syntactic problem visually prominent with how different they look. Any ligature that doesn’t help you be a better code reader is a useless visual artifact, a distraction even.

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