What’s weird about programming in proportional fonts? I’ve been doing that for a decade now. Auto formatter mandated at work doesn’t allow for manual format directives anyways, so no one notices.
Ligatures can be nice if you can solve the edit problem: keeping an -> as two characters even if it looks like → can help a lot. Unfortunately, editors don’t do that, so they become too annoying to use (maybe when we render code like we render latex will it be accepted).
I use vim in Windows Terminal as my daily driver, and the terminal definitely treats ligatures as separate characters (taking up multiple character widths, you edit the characters one at a time, etc). I'm mildly curious what editor doesn't, because that would lend significantly greater creedance to the article's arguments.
Yes. I use ligatures on my system (Windows) and this is true in all IDEs, editors and terminal Windows, including when I SSH to a Linux system and use vim.
It really becomes seamless, and you get used to it in a similar way to syntax highlighting or high resolution screen. Yes, I can code on 768p laptop screen with laggy input and a crappy keyboard, but it's not as nice as my usual workstation.
Input and Go Font are the two main coding proportional fonts I know. Neither advertise ligature support. There are hacks to copy ligatures from Fira Code in to other fonts but I don't know if they would work for this purpose. https://github.com/ToxicFrog/Ligaturizer
Ligatures can be nice if you can solve the edit problem: keeping an -> as two characters even if it looks like → can help a lot. Unfortunately, editors don’t do that, so they become too annoying to use (maybe when we render code like we render latex will it be accepted).