Comment by jhanschoo
2 years ago
> When I press backspace or cursor keys, I expect one glyph to be erased, not who-knows-how-many.
That's you, and not very generalizable. Many people edit on sites with ligatures and many people edit non-Latin text where isolated, non-ligatured text is wrong (Arabic, some Indic scripts, Han characters, Japanese katakana).
Me personally, with respect to code, I pretty much think in terms of tokens: to remove the `==`, I backspace twice, rather than that to remove the `==`, I remove `=` and then the other `=`, and each requires one backspace.
Also ligatures in a monospaced font are going to tell you they’re multiple characters because they’re either fat af or misaligned. You know it’s coming.
To be honest though I think I like those big fat commas the best. As someone pointed out, using dot and comma as semantically important in software is a mistake because they only differ by one pixel.
Vertical columns of background have, until ligatures, been a bullet proof means for brains to delineate characters. Is it possible to figure out with an increased cognitive load? Yes. Is it exactly as easy as without? No.
I'm confused, because I can delineate the characters in your comment fine, and this is with my browser's default sans-serif proportional typeface. I tend to read English text left-to-right, though, so if others are more comfortable reading top-to-bottom (or bottom-to-top, or middle-out), then my apologies.
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