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Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures

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11–20 of 246 posts

Re: Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures

#12

I'm not sure that ligatures would be an improvement for legibility or editing code.

I happen to like them, but the only one I'd put forth as a definite improvement is that JS/PHP's triple-equal === operator gets turned into three horizontal lines that take up more vertical space than the double-equal does. That can be the cause of subtle bugs, so I think making that distinction more obvious is a win.

Re: Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures

#14
post #7

It slightly alters the monospacing which would drive me batty when coding, but cool idea. Especially for displaying code like in a blog post or other non-interactive use.

In my experience using Fira Code with VS, VS Code, and Konsole, the monospacing isn't a problem. The ligatures are designed so that they fill up the same width as the original characters. My opinion might be biased by a heavy math background, but I like that e.g. "less than or equal" now looks the same as the way I write it on paper, and I don't find myself spending any time thinking about what that symbol means. I'l…

In the GIF, you can see the other characters earlier in the ligature shifting around when a character is added or removed to complete or undo the ligature. That would just bother me.

Re: Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures

#15
I like switching fonts every couple of years just to keep it fresh.

My font right now is Iosevka: https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/ A font generated from its source code. You can build your own variant. It has ligatures as well.

I like that it’s not as wide as many other monospace fonts.

Re: Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures

#17
For some people this might be great but for me this is a total sensorial overload, I tried to use some of these fonts in the past and I just loose track of the code.

Did anyone experience the same in the begging and grew to actually like these fonts or was it always a "love at first sight" experience for you that use them?

Re: Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures

#19
I personally love hasklig. Iterm2 has it on the Mac, but I'm sol on Ubuntu.

Is there any good terminal app that supports ligatures? I tried konsole, but the font looked like it wasn't getting any anti-aliasing and was harder to read as a result.

I love terminator, but it doesn't support ligatures.

What do you use?

Re: Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures

#20
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience using Fira Code with VS, VS Code, and Konsole, the monospacing isn't a problem. The ligatures are designed so that they fill up the same width as the original characters. My opinion might be biased by a heavy math background, but I like that e.g. "less than or equal" now looks the same as the way I write it on paper, and I don't find myself spending any time thinking about what that symbol means. I'l…

In the GIF, you can see the other characters earlier in the ligature shifting around when a character is added or removed to complete or undo the ligature. That would just bother me.

Ah, that's fair. It is a little bit of visual noise, maybe roughly equivalent to the blinking of matching parens or braces as you move your cursor around.

I think the slight improvement in visual clarity when reading the ligatures makes up for the slight noise when writing them, but it's definitely a personal preference.

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