[saclark11]

I see a lot of folks in this thread lamenting the usage of ligatures, but note that the downloaded set of font files includes a "JetBrainsMonoNL" version of all variants, which does not include ligatures ("NL", as in, "No Ligatures").

I do not like ligatures either, yet this is my favorite monospaced font. I use JetBrainsMonoNL in all the places.

[no_wizard]

I'm starting to wonder if this is becoming spaces vs tabs. It seems silly to heavily critique a font because it supports ligatures and inversely seems silly to critique a font because it does not.

Most fonts with ligatures can be used without them anyway, making the whole thing moot

[sebastiandb]

However, not all IDEs, text editors, and terminal emulators support disabling the use of ligatures, so it's often easiest to just switch to a font that doesn't include them if you don't want them.

[ammar2]

huh, I'm surprised from searching that there isn't a quick tool to just disable ligatures given a font file. It should just be a matter of removing the ligatures in the GSUB table from the font.

[debaserab2]

Just switch the font variant to NL - no need for editor support.

[ammar2]

Doesn't that depend on the font author providing a NL version?

e.g if you want the FiraCode improvements[1] over FiraMono without the ligatures. Without editor support, you would have to build it yourself since they don't distribute a NL version.

[1] https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode#whats-in-the-box

[_jyty]

That's what I mean; it's often easier to use a font that doesn't have ligatures (like the NL variant) than to use a font with ligatures and hope your editor lets you disable ligatures.

[sedatk]

I like ligatures but only when they help to remove ambiguity. For example, the ligatures for “=>” (⇒) and “>=“ (≥) are helpful because they make a syntactic problem visually prominent with how different they look. Any ligature that doesn’t help you be a better code reader is a useless visual artifact, a distraction even.