[nicoburns]

> With ligatures, you can actually see the symbol you're representing, and not an approximation.

I think the flip side (which is why many people don't like them) is that with ligatures you can't see the actual code that you've written, only an approximation.

[yoz-y]

When I'm reading the code I need to understand what it does, the underlying characters are just a medium. I can see way quicker that a complex boolean expression is wrong when I see ≠ instead of != and ⪖ instead of >=.

I do agree with the Butterick that when presenting code to others, for example as examples, the ligatures are a big no, because in this case you actually need to see what characters you need to input.

[nicoburns]

In that case it works reasonably well, but how do you represent the difference between `=`, `==` and `===` in javascript. IMO =, == and === is much clearer and more visually distinct than ≔, = and ≡.

[yoz-y]

Mainly a force of habit. But I agree that for equalities a split sign would be clearer for most people.

I won't be going around and trying to convince people to use or not use ligatures though. I feel that it is a very personal preference much like the choice of syntax colouring theme.

[hydroxideOH-]

I never use == in any circumstance anyway, but telling the difference between the == and === ligatures are really not hard. The === one, at least with JetBrains Mono, is much larger.