Ligatures in programming fonts: hell no

> if you’re preparing your code for others to read—whether on screen or on paper—skip the ligatures. The article should have led with this. Instead this main caveat is buried in a paragraph, where it is preceded by, what boils down to, "do what you want, but you will recognize its wrong someday." Of course people will focus on that part and on the most prevalent use of ligatures in programming: In their own local editor. (Where people usually have…

Ligatures in programming look cute, and maybe if you want to showcase a snippet of some particularly clever and elegant code, print it on some expensive paper with tasteful palette (and none of your CMYK nonsense! Only pure pigments!), frame it, and hang it on the wall, I can see its appeal. At work, I've tried it. I've tried hard to like it. I had to stop because Fira Code (and ligatured Iosevka) took the principle of the least astonishment…

Used 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…

Big long rant trying to very weakly justify a personal preference that you can easily enable/disable if you want, and which is strictly visual anyway. They do almost never go wrong, meaning if you find it makes your code easier to read and more pleasant to look at, this is well worth the essentially negligible number of times they cause an issue. And you can just disable / not use the ligatures in those cases!