this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
458 points (92.4% liked)

Programmer Humor

32472 readers
601 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] -5 points 6 months ago (12 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (7 children)

What's wrong with Ligatures? It makes reading code a bit more tolerable.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (6 children)

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 '!'.
[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

they break with monospacedness

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Oh, yeah, I meant that it makes two characters into one big one, visually reaching across two or three widths, or just having one of the characters larger than the usual grid, e.g. in := the equals sign reaches into the width of the colon.

This reminds me of a recent Microsoft font¹, so naturally here's a rant about that: They developed a feature, called "texture-healing", which basically allows characters that normally need to cramp into one monospace width, like m or w, to reach into the space of neighboring characters, if those neighboring characters are narrow, like an i.

In theory, not a terrible idea, but then you get this kind of hate crime:

Obviously, might just be me again, but not having these letters align, just looks so much worse to me.

¹: It's this font: https://monaspace.githubnext.com/

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (8 replies)