GitLab

Problem

Now that mainstream Monospace Typefaces have support for ligatures—typefaces such as Pragmata Pro, Hasklig, & Fira Code—it now seems worthwhile to add Ligature support to iTerm2 when previously that probably couldn’t be justiable.

An Example of the desired outcome

Here’s a figure of a Monospace font¹ w/ Ligatures when ligatures are disabled:

Here’s a figure of a Monospace font w/ Ligatures when ligatures are active:

Nuances

In the spirit of the existing configurability already available, this may be desired to be toggled on & off in the text section of options since this only makes sense to be active for monospace (fixed-width) Typefaces.

As noted by George Nachman himself with my brief interaction with him about this that lead to this issue being worthwhile to be filed, “ligature needs to be as wide as the original chars or everything gets confused”.

Therefore, ligatures being rendered only makes sense for fixed-width (monospace) fonts to not “confuse” everything; accordingly, it makes sense for it to be configurable for it to be active or not for users who’ve decided to eccentrically use a non-monospace typeface with their instances of iTerm.**

This will ensure the ligatures of their non-monospace typeface creating undesirable results to their existing iTerm2 experience.

This will also obviously allow people who have Monospace fonts with ligatures have an option for them to not be used if undesired for whatever reason.

Footmarks

¹: The Monospace font demonstrated in this email is Fira Code. It’s an open-source, monospace typeface that can be downloaded on Github here