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FiraCode: Free monospaced font with programming ligatures

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61–70 of 159 posts

Re: FiraCode: Free monospaced font with programming ligatures

#61
post #28

Ligatures, IMO, make for a bad coding editor experience. No, I do not want >> parsed as a right shift when it's actually used as two adjacent template delimiters. And no, I'm not okay with the inconsistency that results from the usage of different operators from one programming language to another. Want to change a != to a == operator? Enjoy futzing with placing the cursor properly. It's a cute idea, but I found it m…

I agree.

I respect that people use it, but it's really not for me. It makes the code harder to read IMO

Re: FiraCode: Free monospaced font with programming ligatures

#62
post #44
post #28

Ligatures, IMO, make for a bad coding editor experience. No, I do not want >> parsed as a right shift when it's actually used as two adjacent template delimiters. And no, I'm not okay with the inconsistency that results from the usage of different operators from one programming language to another. Want to change a != to a == operator? Enjoy futzing with placing the cursor properly. It's a cute idea, but I found it m…

You can always use the original version without ligatures, Fira Mono, available here: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fira+Mono

Or you can just disable ligatures in the editor.

Re: FiraCode: Free monospaced font with programming ligatures

#63
This is a stretch:

> Your eye spends a non-zero amount of energy to scan, parse and join multiple characters into a single logical one.

I don’t know how many calories are expended by the brain to perform this, but it has to be near-negligible.

I am _extremely_ used to seeing characters as they are in ASCII, and retraining myself for some infinitesimal savings in visual processing seems like a net negative.

Maybe this is useful if you grew up with them? By all means do whatever you want for your own env.

Re: FiraCode: Free monospaced font with programming ligatures

#64
post #42

"Oh, a post about a programming font; let's see if there are any comments not from killjoys who can't help but advertise their hatred of ligatures" *opens comments* *shakes head, closes tab*

Although what did you expect, since there isn't much else to discuss about fonts that isn't subjective. We could discuss slashed vs dotted zeros, I guess.

Re: FiraCode: Free monospaced font with programming ligatures

#65

This is a stretch: > Your eye spends a non-zero amount of energy to scan, parse and join multiple characters into a single logical one. I don’t know how many calories are expended by the brain to perform this, but it has to be near-negligible. I am _extremely_ used to seeing characters as they are in ASCII, and retraining myself for some infinitesimal savings in visual processing seems like a net negative. Maybe this…

> Your eye spends a non-zero amount of energy to scan, parse and join multiple characters into a single logical one.

Is the implication that with FiraCode, the eye will finally spend zero energy on scanning, parsing and joining glyphs? Finally, after all these years, a perpetual motion machine! :-)

Re: FiraCode: Free monospaced font with programming ligatures

#66

This is a stretch: > Your eye spends a non-zero amount of energy to scan, parse and join multiple characters into a single logical one. I don’t know how many calories are expended by the brain to perform this, but it has to be near-negligible. I am _extremely_ used to seeing characters as they are in ASCII, and retraining myself for some infinitesimal savings in visual processing seems like a net negative. Maybe this…

I'm pretty sure the eye spends exactly zero Joules on interpretation of visual stimuli.

As for the brain, the brain doesn't see characters at the perceptual level, that it then needs to join at the cognitive level into tokens. At the perceptual level it just sees shapes. Whether it takes more energy to parse != or ≠ is something I don't anyone has ever researched.

Re: FiraCode: Free monospaced font with programming ligatures

#67
post #42

"Oh, a post about a programming font; let's see if there are any comments not from killjoys who can't help but advertise their hatred of ligatures" *opens comments* *shakes head, closes tab*

Ordinary glyphs and ligatures (if any) are generally thought to be designed together. Turning ligatures off is not a proper solution but a workaround---you would be using something different from what was originally designed [1]. And sufficiently many people think most uses of ligatures in programming fonts are indeed bad, therefore those fonts are also bad, thus endless complaints.

[1] And if ligatures are designed independently from ordinary glyphs, there is no reason to make them default.

Re: FiraCode: Free monospaced font with programming ligatures

#69

This is a stretch: > Your eye spends a non-zero amount of energy to scan, parse and join multiple characters into a single logical one. I don’t know how many calories are expended by the brain to perform this, but it has to be near-negligible. I am _extremely_ used to seeing characters as they are in ASCII, and retraining myself for some infinitesimal savings in visual processing seems like a net negative. Maybe this…

I'm pretty sure the eye spends exactly zero Joules on interpretation of visual stimuli. As for the brain, the brain doesn't see characters at the perceptual level, that it then needs to join at the cognitive level into tokens. At the perceptual level it just sees shapes. Whether it takes more energy to parse != or ≠ is something I don't anyone has ever researched.

You might be surprised to hear that the eye actually does a lot of "preprocessing" for the brain.

Re: FiraCode: Free monospaced font with programming ligatures

#70
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the eye spends exactly zero Joules on interpretation of visual stimuli. As for the brain, the brain doesn't see characters at the perceptual level, that it then needs to join at the cognitive level into tokens. At the perceptual level it just sees shapes. Whether it takes more energy to parse != or ≠ is something I don't anyone has ever researched.

You might be surprised to hear that the eye actually does a lot of "preprocessing" for the brain.

Preprocessing is not the same as interpretation, in the same way that a pixel shader is not computer vision.
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