Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No
practicaltypography.com
Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No
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Re: Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No
#2I wouldn't use these fonts in documentation or on a blog. But I love them in my editor, where only I need to understand the difference between the literal characters and those tasty ligatures.
Re: Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No
#3Fonts like Fira Code are attractive for the same reason animated cursors are attractive - they give people a way to add fun little baubles to their working environment. No, they don't benefit your productivity and in many cases make it worse (e.g. confusing ligatures or buggy editor plugins) but decorations are by definition not of utility.
Re: Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No
#4The article would have been a lot better if there was at least one example of where a coding ligature was a problem, rather than talking about feet and inches
For instance it mentions the pairing => but provides no examples.
After reading I’m far from convinced that carefully curated language specific ligatures are a bad idea.
Re: Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No
#5It also makes the lives of terminal emulator developers much more difficult. Won't someone think of the terminal emulator developers?
Re: Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No
#6It also makes the lives of terminal emulator developers much more difficult. Won't someone think of the terminal emulator developers?
the future is now old man, you WILL run vscode in a deeply nested docker environment and you WILL learn to love it /s
Re: Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No
#7I've been using fonts w/ ligatures in my IDEs for many years now with many different languages. Not a single issue, ever.
I do get the point that author is making here, but it's only important for these kinds of discussions in a vacuum, detached from reality, as self-important typography and design blogs usually are.
Re: Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No
#8I suppose Adobe want to draw attention to ligatures because they want to draw attention to the fact that their software supports them. That "Th" ligature is pretty bad.
Re: Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No
#9> So what’s the problem with programming ligatures? // They contradict Unicode.
The Unicode ligatures in the Alphabetic Presentation Forms block (U+0FB00 - U+0FB4F) are only present for compatibility purposes, so that legacy texts in encodings which contain precomposed ligatures can be losslessly reencoded to/from Unicode. They aren't meant to represent the entirety of all ligatures.
Re: Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No
#10Used judiciously, ligatures can help make code more readable, not less. Consider JavaScript's == and ===, and their inverses != and !==. I personally find them difficult to visually distinguish on occasion (especially the negative forms). Fira Code [0] replaces them with two-bar and three-bar equals signs (something like =, ≠, ≡, and ≢, only wider; see the link for a screenshot). I personally find these easier to distinguish from one another at a glance. I'm sure it's not for everyone, but in my opinion at least these ligatures improve readability.
I'm generally a fan of Practical Typography, but this post is unnecessarily condescending. It's sort of laughable to claim that "this isn’t a matter of taste" when users are making this choice in the privacy of their own editors.