I'm playing with font ligatures using Fira Code, it is fun to see them rendered and they convey a meaning quite clearly, however it is sometimes confusing to actually edit the rendered ligature.
For example, looking at this, the meaning is clear:
However, what's not immediately obvious is what will happen if I press Del or Backspace in this case:
In fact, in this particular case the code is:
What I suggest to do is to not render a ligature if a cursor is currently over it, just render !==.
Then it is very obvious what Del or Backspace will do 🙂
I guess it should be relatively easy to achieve, because a ligature always takes the same number of cells as all of the the underlying "raw" characters.
I have seen people express this opinion for font creators (e.g. be5invis/Iosevka#257), where they suggest to edit the font and choose a better design. However, I think rendering "raw" characters instead of a ligature when the cursor is above the glyph is a more generic and font-agnostic solution.
I'm not sure if this requires a configuration option or should become a new behavior for everyone.
UPDATE: looks like I'm not the first one who thought of this (hehe), and Qterminal and Konsole already have such behavior:
I'm playing with font ligatures using Fira Code, it is fun to see them rendered and they convey a meaning quite clearly, however it is sometimes confusing to actually edit the rendered ligature.
For example, looking at this, the meaning is clear:
However, what's not immediately obvious is what will happen if I press Del or Backspace in this case:
In fact, in this particular case the code is:
What I suggest to do is to not render a ligature if a cursor is currently over it, just render
!==.Then it is very obvious what Del or Backspace will do 🙂
I guess it should be relatively easy to achieve, because a ligature always takes the same number of cells as all of the the underlying "raw" characters.
I have seen people express this opinion for font creators (e.g. be5invis/Iosevka#257), where they suggest to edit the font and choose a better design. However, I think rendering "raw" characters instead of a ligature when the cursor is above the glyph is a more generic and font-agnostic solution.
I'm not sure if this requires a configuration option or should become a new behavior for everyone.
UPDATE: looks like I'm not the first one who thought of this (hehe), and Qterminal and Konsole already have such behavior: