Do you also care about inverted scroll and dark/light themes? None of it matters.

I sometimes feels there's now a race between typefacers to stuff as many ligatures as possible to the point that it's bordering in indecipherability and clownishness. There's definitely an audience for this though, else why would they do it.

Have you considered that it’s not indecipherable or clownish and perhaps you are a part of a group that just doesn’t get it?

Not OP, but that’s my conclusion. I also don’t like programming font ligatures, but I personally find it annoying when people who share my opinion feel the need to point it out in a discussion of fonts clearly designed for people who don’t share my opinion. It’s highly subjective and the prevalence of these ligatures has never been a huge burden for me, because fonts without them are rather prevalent as well, as are means to bypass them in my own use.

And you can use the font with ligatures disabled! Almost as if having ligatures was a preference that doesn’t influence those who don’t want them yet may convince someone who does to try out font X :)

I love ligatures, solely because I think they look pretty on my own screen. I especially like that our ASCII art arrows like -> are now little arrow pictures.

Emacs’s ligatures.el handles this nicely: you configure which specific ligatures you want to enable on a per-font basis. Want only -> and only in Berkeley Mono? Only turn that one on.

Ok. Well maybe disable them, then.

They aren't for me either!!

When pairing with people who use them, I find it harder to read, which is ok as long as variable names differ enough but it makes it really hard to distinguish == vs ===, and => vs -> etc...

Same here... Also, I had to enable web page fonts to actually see the horror :)

You don't have to use them.

I don't see what these kinds of comments add. You see them in every discussion on a font that has them.

> You don't have to use them.

> I don't see what these kinds of comments add.

I think you've missed something from those comments.

Scenario: You're looking at a screenshot of someone else's code (from documentation, blog post, video, etc...). You see a ligature you're not familiar with. Now you cannot follow the rest of the information.

Question: What do you do?

I also don’t get it. I first started seeing it used by kids coming out of Hack Reactor etc. and hence to me it screams “amateur hour”.

Of course plenty of people far more experienced than me use them; they still look like clowns though.