A little over a month ago Daring Fireball linked to a new monospaced font with support for coding optimized ligatures. I was already using a JetBrains IDE for my primary development at work so I decided to give it a try, and one month in I am really liking it.
Some of the ligatures such as =>
are purely cosmetic changes, but others such as the greater or equal symbol and the less than or equal to symbol are much easier to read. The font has been designed with care to the point where even differentiating between ===
and ==
is easier with ligatures enabled. The only symbol I am not yet sold on is the one for !=
which is easy enough to read, but so different from how it is typed that it slows me occasionally.
Overall I finding viewing my code through these ligatures to be an improvement, and plan to keep on using them in any development environment where they are supported.