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Don't get old, kids, it sucks.
Going through this, I was introduced to <= being converted to a ligature which immediately ruled it as a nope for me. No monkey business with the characters of my code thank you very much.
This is also the first time I've noticed that some fonts have the center cane of the lower-case "m" shorter than the other canes. I love that! Interestingly, Ubuntu Mono was the font I landed on - which is already the font that I use. At least I'm consistent.
My favourite* bit about this thread is the number of times I've gone "ooh, that looks like a nice font", downloaded it, unzipped it, and loaded into Fontbook which has promptly gone "you already have this one DUMBASS". Don't get old, kids, it sucks.
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That is usually configurable at the terminal level- for example, both wezterm and ghostty have available configs to control this behavior.
Good to know. I’ve been using ghostty and generally not a fan of the code ligatures (or just too stubborn to adapt!).
Some people like ligatures, some people do not like them, but this does not matter, because any decent text editor or terminal emulator has a setting to enable or disable ligatures.
Any good programming font must have ligatures, which will keep happy both kinds of users, those who like and those who dislike ligatures.
I strongly hate the straitjacket forced by ASCII upon programming languages, which is the root cause of most ambiguous grammars that complicate the parsing of programming languages and increase the probability of bugs, and which has also forced the replacement of traditional mathematical symbols with less appropriate characters.
Using Unicode for source programs is the best solution, but when having to use legacy programming languages in a professional setting, where the use of a custom preprocessor would be frowned upon, using fonts with ligatures is still an improvement over ASCII.
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Good to know. I’ve been using ghostty and generally not a fan of the code ligatures (or just too stubborn to adapt!).
Because most of those who commented are among those who do not like ligatures, I must present a counterpoint, to diminish the statistical bias. Some people like ligatures, some people do not like them, but this does not matter, because any decent text editor or terminal emulator has a setting to enable or disable ligatures. Any good programming font must have ligatures, which will keep happy both kinds of users, thos…
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Italics turn into cursive... I cannot imagine ever wanting this in my IDE, but that's just me.
I know right?! And apparently only certain letters become cursive in italic, so it's not even consistent about it?! This seems bizarre to me, I do not understand the rationale behind it. Can someone enlighten me?
I love this, but I really wish it were structured as a "Hot or Not" type of round robin system rather than a bracket. Some fonts are close enough that I don't know if I'd choose one over the other consistently, and I'd be curious to see a percentage score of how much I like a particular font.
Unfortunately, I don't believe there's any established algorithm for how to repeatedly sample pairwise preferences to convert them into a strict ranking, which would ideally be with an active learning component to really drill down into the comparisons that are the closest. Would be a fascinating thing to try to develop, though.