[InsideOutSanta]

Rationally, what you say makes sense, of course. But I love ligatures for programming. First of all, I think they just look nice.

But second, I also feel that for me, they make code a bit more readable. Without ligatures, multiple characters are often used to create one symbol; with ligatures, one symbol is always rendered as one single visual character. So if I read code, it just feels a bit easier for my brain to parse ≥, rather than >=.

[Zanfa]

> So if I read code, it just feels a bit easier for my brain to parse ≥, rather than >=.

Clearly there's personal preferences involved, so there's no objectively better or worse, but it still blows my mind, because reading ligature symbols like ≥ and ≠ always makes my brain skip a beat, so I need to reread a few times to "get it".

[WorldMaker]

Some of that subjective influence with ≥ and ≠ especially is how much time you've spent in math courses or reading math papers. For some of us those have always been the "real" operators and >= and != the fallback replacements that look "close enough" in easy to type ASCII. We were sort of doing the opposite all along, translating the ASCII breakdowns into the math notation in our heads, and ligatures can feel like a bit of a relief because now you see the "real thing".