why did kotlin documents use these fucking idiotic font that combines 2 characters into one stupid looking icon? how is it friendly to a noob? how am i suppose to know how exactly am I suppose to input these piece of shit?

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These are font ligatures...

https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

You can find here some common ligatures and their replacements.

But yes. Bad choice for documentation.... Not everyone likes it. It takes time to get used to it.

Realtalk, font ligatures fucking suck if you are used to classic fonts.

Docs shouldn't have ligatures, simple as that.

@PublicByte well I've also found out about font ligatures only couple months ago when Jetbrains released their new font which supports them.

Honestly I don't like them mostly due to the fact they basically fool you on what you see. I can certainly see how this might be attractive if you're relatively new dev and/or have some non-dev background, but deffo agree with this rant, these shouldn't be pushed anywhere else except someone's private editor.

Normal operators (as in non-transformed to ligatures) are standard in most if not all programming languages and using ligatures introduces unnecessary confusion for most of devs on places like code documentation.

@nitwhiz no, I loved them the first time I found out about them.

They make it very much obvious what operation it is and I have switched every editor I have over to them.

But I agree that it should be an active choice to use them, not default.

@myss "I can certainly see how this might be attractive if you're relatively new dev and/or have some non-dev background"

Neither are true for me and I still like ligatures.

@VaderNT congrats, you belong to edge cases

@myss a lot of these I was using a life time ago in school.
So to have fonts that use the same symbols I was using for math operators back then is more nostalgic then trendy for me.

> how exactly am I suppose to input these

That's actually a fair point, you don't know that from the docs alone. You need an introduction to the language's syntax first. Which you need anyway to work with any language so... 🤷‍♂️

@myss I don't mind being an edge case. In an older version of this comment I asked you to back that up with numbers. It doesn't matter though.

Your original point was you see utility for new devs or non-dev people. From the comments here you see ligatures are useful for a much wider range of people. Congrats, your horizon was broadened, that's what I truly care about. Forget those numbers.

I think it'd be quite easy to substitute the font for something else using Stylish.

Also, I think they are kinda advertising Jetbrains Mono here with flashy ligatures.

Here comes the popcorn seller.

I wanted to help, but I see that they managed without me

I already got used to firacode, I have it on all of my IDEs. It's a pleasure to my eyes 😌

I don't think the ligatures are the most hideous parts of FiraCode!

I do think ligatures makes it far to difficult to see the difference between =, ==, and === at a glance and with many errors in popular languages being a result of mixing those up, that's just silly to me.
Also reading from the ligature which character to change for the operator to change is a little less obvious, especially if you're new to a language or syntax.

Ligatures are cool and I love them but they don't belong in documentation

Maybe it’s snobby but I immediately lose like 50% of the respect I have for a fellow coder if I see him or her use font ligatures. I don’t have a good reason for doing so.

@sawmurai That seems kinda snobby yes.