Hacker News Reader

Comment by freetonik | Hacker News Reader

Tangental, but I'm wondering if I'm the only one who really dislikes ligatures? I mean, some people say they simply don't prefer them, but I actually struggle to read and edit code with ligatures. Looking at a single character, pressing Backspace, and seeing it cut in half and transform is very disorienting, it breaks all my intuitions about text editing.

View on HN

+∞

I ended up googling how to disable ligatures in CSS, went to the developer tools and hunted down where they're being enabled so I could use the website. It's on the

  .CodeMirror pre.CodeMirror-line, .CodeMirror pre.CodeMirror-line-like

rule (codemirror.css:240), you can edit it to:

  font-variant-ligatures: none;

I never really understood what value ligatures even bring to normal text.

But for code, they're just an abomination.

You're in good company. Ligatures were really not meant to be used this way, and materially harm the editing experience IMO.

I'm with you. Sometimes the symbols are ambiguous and totally unreadable.

An example is >>=, which is "inplace shr" in some languages, but "monad bind" in others. A unified ligature for >>= really confuses me.

Fellow ligature-disliker reporting in! It messes with my typing intuition that when I hit a key, a new character is not printed on the screen (instead, the last character is altered).

I hate ligatures.

Same here. I always turn ligatures off.

Weirdly, I like ligatures only in Elixir, and no other language (Ruby, Go, Javascript, etc).

My gripe with ligatures is this: when they are rendered as a single character, I get weirded out by editing them because they change in the editor on the fly. I prefer to have code "as is" without having to think about the context within which this or that character or ligature is rendered, because it's very distracting, disruptive even.

(Sorry for offtopic, but does anyone else have upvote/downvote buttons not visible for freetonik's comment?)

Same. Came here to say there's no option to only show me fonts that don't use ligatures (and some come in both/multiple flavours). That checkbox needs to be tri-state.

Same here, I hate ligatures.

Yeah, I am absolutely not a fan of ligatures. I also find it disorienting and I prefer to see what the compiler is going to see.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com