zlacker

>>davidb+(OP)
The "Texture Healing" feature is a really smart use of OpenType features to make problematic monospace combinations look much better without breaking the grid at all.

One naive way to do this would be to create ligature pairs for difficult pairs (mi, lm, etc). But instead, they seem to be selecting character alternates that fill the fixed width differently based on their surroundings.

>>turnso+B7
So many people here are now praising texture healing, but to me its just half-way measure. Why are we as a community so resistant for adopting variable-width fonts? This texture healing already breaks perfect character cell grid, so in some ways it feels like worst of both worlds.

I feel at least partially the same about fancy ligatures; we could just use the actual characters in source code, Unicode is widely supported. Raku does that, but it would need better typesetting (with variable-width fonts) to really shine.

>>zokier+Lq1
I hate ligatures in code.

It sometimes breaks out of the grid, but there still is a grid. Things are sometimes not micro-aligned but still macro-aligned, and that matters (to me).

>>SonOfL+Yt1
If two character combination breaking the grid is acceptable then is three character combos ok too? What about four characters, or twenty? Where do you draw the line?

>>zokier+o42
I draw the line at spaces, usually, because functionally there are usually spaces around where I care to have alignment.

But also, since I'm writing a character stream, I care about being able to see it as a monotonic stream of distinct characters (which is why I hate hate hate ligatures for e.g. "!=") and moving characters a tiny bit doesn't break that.