[ojkelly]

I thought the same, but when Berkeley Mono got ligatures I gave them a go and never turned them off.

I think the truth is that any good monospace font is designed with an awareness of the grid those characters are laid out in. The rhythm and stability of that grid is a feature of monospace fonts. It lets us line up text, draw shapes and so on.

You would think not having the underlying characters visible would be an issue, but ligatures are just symbols like any other. In a short time you learn to read them, like you would any contracted word.

[0110101001]

Decided to check those ligatures out, but this is pretty much entirely unreadable to me.

https://usgraphics.com/static/products/TX-02/images/TX-02-li...

[WorldMaker]

It is probably a bit easier to start from a language you are familiar with. That image intentionally is a mismatch of random arrows and operators that don't necessarily align to the semantics of real code.

I think that's one of the things Fira Code's Readme [1] does a better job at than Berkeley Mono's page. The top big image breaks down the ligatures in high level categories or the programming language they are most associated with, side by side the version with a ligature. Further down the Readme you can several real examples from programming languages with the ligatures called out, giving you the context clues of what it looks like in a language you may be already familiar with.

[1] https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/tree/6.2

[neilpanchal]

There is a ligatures explorer to see exactly how glyphs relevant to a particular programming language of interest would look like, with or without ligatures: https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono/ligatures