Live data from Hacker News

Sublime Text 3 now has font ligature support

forum.sublimetext.com

21–30 of 115 posts

Re: Sublime Text 3 now has font ligature support

#22

Honest question: Why would you want ligatures in plaintext? Especially in code, wouldn't that be weird as some people tend to manually align their code? Like, modular_raft = 10 spam = 20 The "ft" in modular_raft should convert to a ligature so (I assume) it will then take one character, instead of two. Then developers viewing that source would have different alignments, depending on whether they use Sublime 3 or not.…

Besides fancy programming fonts (which I have mixed feelings about), ligatures and other complex text shaping features can also be necessary for legibly rendering string literals in some non-Latin scripts, like Arabic script. Even if your code is all in Latin letters, you might have test data, UI text, etc., that's in something else.

Thank you for providing this insight -- I'm one of the seemingly rare few who hates ligatures in my Latin-script fonts, and when I saw this submission my brain leapt to "augh, why!?" -- you've given at least one very clear use-case where ligature support is valuable, which I was totally unaware of.

Re: Sublime Text 3 now has font ligature support

#23

I think Sublime Text is very good but has fallen behind in terms of version control. I think Atom and VS Code are winning the war right now. Especially because the latter are free.

I personally prefer version control in sublime with suitable plugins it's the debugging experience that I feel is lacking in sublime Vs vscode and atom

Sublime does not have the concept of panels so any kind of debugger in sublime looks and handles really bad

Re: Sublime Text 3 now has font ligature support

#25
post #24
post #20

I love the idea of ligatures, but I don't find Fira Code very comfortable. Any other recommendations? EDIT: Some fonts I like are Courier New and Droid Sans Mono.

Iosevka is a nice one

Iosevka is way too thin for me. I'm going to try out Hasklig (moving from Ubuntu Mono)

Re: Sublime Text 3 now has font ligature support

#26

I think Sublime Text is very good but has fallen behind in terms of version control. I think Atom and VS Code are winning the war right now. Especially because the latter are free.

And Magit wipes the floor with them, so I guess all Atom and VS Code users should migrate to Emacs ;).

People judge editors along different dimensions. E.g. I have tried Visual Studio and Atom, but for me they (especially Atom) are simply to slow compared to Sublime/Emacs/vim.

Re: Sublime Text 3 now has font ligature support

#27

Honest question: Why would you want ligatures in plaintext? Especially in code, wouldn't that be weird as some people tend to manually align their code? Like, modular_raft = 10 spam = 20 The "ft" in modular_raft should convert to a ligature so (I assume) it will then take one character, instead of two. Then developers viewing that source would have different alignments, depending on whether they use Sublime 3 or not.…

Even if monospaced fonts have that ligature, I'm sure they make it as wide as two characters, as the ligature is simply a single glyph representing two characters.

Re: Sublime Text 3 now has font ligature support

#28

Honest question: Why would you want ligatures in plaintext? Especially in code, wouldn't that be weird as some people tend to manually align their code? Like, modular_raft = 10 spam = 20 The "ft" in modular_raft should convert to a ligature so (I assume) it will then take one character, instead of two. Then developers viewing that source would have different alignments, depending on whether they use Sublime 3 or not.…

This reminds me of elastic tabstops. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_stop#Elastic_tabstops

Does Sublime Text support those? Any other popular editor? If not, why?

Re: Sublime Text 3 now has font ligature support

#29
post #20

I love the idea of ligatures, but I don't find Fira Code very comfortable. Any other recommendations? EDIT: Some fonts I like are Courier New and Droid Sans Mono.

I've been using Hasklig lately. Given your preferences, you might be interested in Monoid.

Re: Sublime Text 3 now has font ligature support

#30

Honest question: Why would you want ligatures in plaintext? Especially in code, wouldn't that be weird as some people tend to manually align their code? Like, modular_raft = 10 spam = 20 The "ft" in modular_raft should convert to a ligature so (I assume) it will then take one character, instead of two. Then developers viewing that source would have different alignments, depending on whether they use Sublime 3 or not.…

I can only speak for me as someone who really loves the aesthetics of code, but there's something super enjoyable about things like arrow functions rendering as actual arrows in Java / JavaScript. It's so clean!

Yeah, only that it does that without any context.

Ligature mishaps are doubleplus-unclean.

Post reply on HN