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Comment by nyx | Hacker News Reader

The progress bar is neat, and it's impressive what modern fonts are capable of and everything... but I'm personally not a fan of ligatures in code fonts. Not sure I can articulate why, but it just feels like we should draw the line at our fonts causing fundamentally different glyphs to be displayed in our editors (e.g. ≤ instead of <=).

Surely this comes down to preference. Does anyone who uses Fira like those ligatures?

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Since I started using font ligatures everywhere (terminals, text editors) they just feel right to me. I don't care (usually) about seeing the exact bytes in text - after all, since we adopted Unicode we also got multi bye characters and multiple characters that are rendered as one. We even have total madness such as Han unification.

Given how messy the whole thing is, it definitely won't all burn down in flames because of a bit of eye candy. Looking at real arrows is IMHO easier than ASCII art. The reason why current programming languages use -> or >= is because it's hard to input those symbols on standard keyboards, but historically their real counterparts were used when readily available (just look at ALGOL).

I do personally. I use Fira with ligatures enabled in any editor I can, and I find that the ligatures help me to be able to quickly scan and understand code better than I could otherwise.

I feel similarly but I'd love to have these ligatures if the programming language actually understood the characters the ligatures look like too.

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