Use them for a bit before judging it, don't forget that you've trained yourself to read some character combinations as meaningful.

After using Fira Code for a while, I can say code looks weird without it. Especially plain === and => look really jarring now. The ligatures also help me spot typos!

Regardless of the ligatures, one of the cooler things about Monoid is how it tries to fix kerning problems inherent to monospace fonts:

https://medium.com/larsenwork-andreas-larsen/class-based-con...

https://github.com/larsenwork/monoid/issues/56

I'd like to use it, but they turn custom operators such as "|>|" into an illegible jumble of characters (in this case, "▷|"). If I'd wanted my operator to be "▷|", I'd have defined it that way.

Now, if they can come up with a way to selectively turn the ligatures off and on, I'll give it another go. Until then, I'm perfectly happy to see the occasional "<=" or something.

Also, that "www" ligature is the stuff of nightmares. Never, ever, with I use that on my computer.

It transforms them from individual characters being put together to approximate symbols into the actual symbols. The act of joining together particular character combinations into more aesthetically pleasing forms is common and very old practice.

It looks odd only because we're accustomed to seeing the individual characters due to display limitations inherited from typewriters and TTY machines.

I agree, except for the www ligature. It just looks odd to only have part of a domain name compressed.

The www is a bit artsy for my tastes as well, at least in a programming sense, but making a ligature of www isn't a terrible thing, IMO. It already almost creates its own ligature, especially when used with a serif font.

Heck, a lot of people I know will make a verbal ligature of www - something like 'dub dub dub'.

www was unnerving to me (and a couple of my team members) too.

In a way I am interested in psychological basis for my innate rejection of this. Conceptually, I comprehend why it is made into it's own ligature, like !=, it is a unit of information these days.

Well, for starters it's an abbreviation, whereas -> or != is an approximation of a symbol, so that makes it different from the rest. Also, you're on a website that has no www in any part of its website, so it's not nearly as ubiquitous.

If anything I think it makes more sense to have :// as a ligature.

> The act of joining together particular character combinations into more aesthetically pleasing forms is common and very old practice.

Yep, the ampersand symbol "&" originated as a ligature for et, Latin for "and". You can see this more obviously in italic families and some fonts expose a more fancier variant as well. Example: http://i.imgur.com/Rsmmql9.jpg.

You sometimes see "&c." for "etc.".

Really? Why is seeing a "less than or equal to" symbol legible in a textbook, but not a text editor?

Reading a textbook is not the same activity as editing code instructions for a computer character-by-character.