Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Programming ligatures
Raised as a usability problem by 6 people on Hacker News over 9 years (2017–2025), in 6 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
- 1Ligatures make code confusing to readUnreviewed
- 1Ligatures make code confusing to readUnreviewed
Every issue, all time, most people first
Ligatures make code confusing to readUnreviewed
20172026- Ligature glyphs are hard to read and make code unreadable2025-01-10
- Ligatures hide operator boundaries, making it hard to tell what's actually typed and to place the cursor2023-07-19
- Ligatures make backspace and cursor boundaries hard to predict and hide what was typed2022-09-07
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 7 complaints
- Ligature glyphs are hard to read and make code unreadable2025-01-10
- Ligatures hide operator boundaries, making it hard to tell what's actually typed and to place the cursor2023-07-19
- Operators like >> render as a shift even when they are two delimiters, confusing the reader2023-07-19
- Ligatures make backspace and cursor boundaries hard to predict and hide what was typed2022-09-07
- Ligatures make operators hard to read at a glance, forcing the reader to double-check2022-01-20
- Ligatures make code confusing to read2020-11-20
- Coworker's screen with ligatures is hard to read2017-07-23