• Ephera@lemmy.ml
        0·
        2 months ago

        I mean, I certainly wouldn’t give someone else shit for using ligatures, but personally, I don’t like them, because:

        • they break with monospacedness. Everything is in a nice grid and you’ve randomly got these character combinations that needlessly stick out.
        • they sometimes happen in places where they really shouldn’t.
        • they hide what the actual characters are. Especially, if go to edit that code, my brain will really struggle for a split-second when there’s a ‘≠’, then I delete one character and rather than the whole thing disappearing, I’m left with a ‘!’.
        • redfellow@sopuli.xyz
          0·
          2 months ago

          Do you also get surprised when you backspace a tab and suddenly it removes more whitespace than 1 characters worth?

          Or did you learn it fast and really never think about it?

          I think it’s more a “getting used to” thing, that once learned, you don’t think about, but it makes things more readable.

          • Ephera@lemmy.ml
            0·
            2 months ago

            Sure, I could get used to it. But it being more readable is not even true for me, because the thing I got used to instead, is that != is the unequals-operator. I see that much more often than ≠.

            • redfellow@sopuli.xyz
              0·
              2 months ago

              Studies show that ligatures improve readability, but I acknowledge that it’s likely untrue for outliers.

              • Ephera@lemmy.ml
                0·
                2 months ago

                For monospace fonts? I’ve heard of such research for proportional fonts, where ligatures definitely make sense to me. But yeah, I wouldn’t assume such research to automatically translate to monospace.

        • Faresh@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          they break with monospacedness

          The IDEs I’ve used had the ligatures be of the same character width as the original operator.

    • redfellow@sopuli.xyz
      0·
      2 months ago

      I mean, we read code more than we write it. You just vomitted over something that increases readability. Maybe a time for a rethink?