DEV Community

Discussion on: Why you should use a developer font

Collapse
 
lucassperez profile image
Lucas Perez • Edited

Ligatures are probably the worst invention of the last few years for me. I can't tell if a big "equals sign" is == or === unless I have used a ligature font before, I find |> becoming a triangle extremely disturbing and most times I look at those symbols and I don't know how to type them, because they're not in my keyboard. This is not a good thing and adds additional overhead.

Also, having <= turned into the lass or equal sign changes the size, not to mention that some people actually have ≤ mapped somewhere or copy-pasted from it, and at this point it is indistinguishable.

Not to mention that having != transformed into a thing with a slash is not straight forward. There are languages who use ~= as the "not equal" sign.

Ligatures adds nothing that is objectively good and makes life harder to understand code when someone who uses it shows you a print or shares screen.

practicaltypography.com/ligatures-...

we don’t want the lowercase l to look like the digit 1, nor the zero to look like a cap O. Whereas ligatures are going the opposite direction: making distinct characters appear to be others.