Add programming ligatures

[BenvdStouwe]

Will not use without them.
See this page.

[Meligy]

Please if you ever do that, keep a version available for those of us who may find ligatures confusing and/or anti the clarity that a monospace font gives.

[1234567-glitch]

@Meligy may be able?

[hiringManager]

Please add ligatures but make them various unrelated WingDings to preserve clarity.

[Roshinator]

The hard part will be getting comic sans style symbols for that, but if someone can make it happen I will switch all my IDEs/text editors to it.

[kilobyte]

Please note that, besides some people's dislike on both aesthetic and practical grounds, a lot of display libraries handle such ligatures poorly. If we're lucky the ligatures are simply ignored, but if the library tries to support them but does something wrong, the font becomes unusable.

This said, I'm not going to stop anyone from making a ligated version, just that the plain version would need to be shipped separately.

[ThomasRettig]

I'm all for thoughtful ligatures (eg. those that modify the whitespace between ≥2 characters while not changing the overall glyph width, refer to JetBrains Mono), but, similar to @kilobyte, I don't like fanciful, over-the-top ones, such as Fira Code, whose design concept is well-meant, but unfortunately led astray by gimmicky non-functional ligatures.

Not only do monospace font ligatures adversely impact the readability of code, they are also uninspired, banal, and ultimately defeat the raison d'etre of monospaced fonts: ensuring that every glyph is clear and unambiguous.

As such, I feel that the addition of programming ligatures to this font will be a highly subjective and thorny issue to tackle; for one, I'm sure some would welcome it, but overall, I am not convinced by this idea, and even if ligatures are pursued, a non-ligated version of the font should be made default. Matthew Butterick raises some good points on this matter (read this insightful article), and I think hardcore monospaced ligature enthusiasts could learn a thing or two from it.

[Roshinator]

Of course, I don't know of any ligated font that doesn't have a pure monospaced option. It's 100% necessary for places like terminals where ligatures don't play nice with the terminal program or for people who don't like it.

[Vishrut19]

Please font ligatures into this font like Fira Code and Cascadia Code as without font ligatures it is very difficult to use.