[bobbylarrybobby]

For me, it's because it messes with my expectations of where my cursor will go when I move it over the ligatured characters and what will happen when I edit them. It's very jarring to delete one character and see the character(s) next to it change.

There is also something to be said for each character being the instructions for how you type it. How to type “->”? Press - then >. With ligatures, that goes out the window, and at least for me, I have to quickly look up in my memory how to type ≥ or ⟹.

That said I do very much like Commit Mono’s “smart kerning”, where characters are adjusted slightly based on the characters surrounding them. I guess you could call it a soft version of ligatures. For instance, when an m is between two i‘s, the i‘s get pushed away a tad to give the m a bit more room to breathe. Similarly, when you type an ellipses (...), the dots get pushed ever so slightly closer together than they would be naively.