Comment by bsder
2 years ago
Can we please stop with abusing ligatures for things like != into ≠? If you want APL, please use APL and leave the rest of us alone.
!= is two bloody characters not one.
And now people are doing it for 3 characters.
With this kind of thing, you get all the text editing idiocy of combining characters (like emojis) for no benefit at all.
See: Text Editing Hates You Too https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/
Well, what if instead of wanting APL (an array-based programming language that really has nothing in common semantically with the one I use day-to-day), I just want things that are conceptually one symbol to actually look like one symbol? After all, you do not have to use my computer which has them enabled, and you do not have to enable them to use fonts that include them. This is straightforwardly 'other people should stop having preferences': No, thank you.
Fortunately for you the ligatures are optional and have no impact on the underlying text. To be "left alone" you have to do exactly nothing.
> To be "left alone" you have to do exactly nothing.
Unfortunately that's not true.
The problem shows itself when looking at codeblocks that developers share (in docs, blogs, videos, etc...)
Ligatures become a readability problem.
If it bugs you that match, usercss?
6 replies →
No. People like them. No one is forcing you to use them. Stop complaining about it.
I have a proposal here...
Jetbrains, VSCode people, whomever: edit mode and presentation view. There are times when I think for a lot of people the traditional math style makes sense for reading, but when it comes to editing, it bothers the hell out of me too.
IntelliJ IDEA has this feature: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/reader-mode.html
In addition to ligatures, you get IMO a better version of the "Mix & Match" idea: doc comments are rendered as normal proportional text.
That's use, not abuse, it's 2 chars, but 1 symbol, so it makes sense to use 1 symbol to represent it. That's the fundamental benefit - matching meaning to representation
Another way to fix the inconsistency is for the language designers to get unstuck from the past and allow literal ≠ in code
This has a "Silicon Valley tabs vs spaces" Richard vibe all over it. Nobody's forcing you to use ligatures - it's IDE / font specific.