• macniel@feddit.de
      154·
      10 months ago

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

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
        132·
        10 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 ‘!’.
        • Faresh@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          10 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
          21·
          10 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
            41·
            10 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
              41·
              10 months ago

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

              • Ephera@lemmy.ml
                2·
                10 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.

    • redfellow@sopuli.xyz
      82·
      10 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?