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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

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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.

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.

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.

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