It's a small change but really does make the code more readable. But (sadface) it seems that Fira Code doesn't support some R tokens that really ought to be ligatured, like %>% pipes and %in% operators. Are there fonts that support these?
Do you have any examples of what those would look like? I know there's an open request re. the pipe operator in FiraCode, and I've been exploring a few others, but I'm not sure what to look out for. I think %in% is helpful to see, but that's just IMHO, and I don't know what it would look like!
Ah, someone has already requested it -- thanks for point me to that. As for what the ligature would look like, I'm no typeface designer but I'd like to emphasize the arrow > part and de-emphasize the ugly percent signs. I'm imagining a prominent right bracket > or arrowhead with small dots or bars, like />/ or •►• . Or maybe little bitty Magritte pipes?
the ligature for %>% shown here seems problematic. that kind of arrow (\Rightarrow in LaTeX) has always meant "implies" to me, so I see that line as 1:10 implies mean. Something more like the %in% ligature would be more clear to me.
What font size/theme do you use? With my standard settings -- 11 pt font, Cobalt (dark) theme, on a non-retina display, I couldn't find a Hasklig variant that was better than mediocre. Fira Code looked much better, so I didn't dig very far into it.
It's Hasklig-Regular 9pt, Solarized Dark theme - on a Mac though, with a retina display. Gorgeous! The real reason I chose Hasklig over Fira Code was something else, however, I just can't remember why I'd have to compare them side by side again.
I see your point - weird! Is this on Windows? This is what it looks like on my machine. I read somewhere that there are known font rendering issues on Windows, particularly on high-DPI displays (similarly on Linux). Not sure
It looks much improved on a Windows 10 high DPI laptop (hidden for image size). I'll take a look at it on a standard resolution Windows 10 PC at some point; I seem to remember Windows 7 and earlier having some issues with anti-aliasing text under "certain" circumstances (that I can't recall at the moment).
Btw. can anyone tell me how hard it would be to put some of the R ligatures into Fira Code, or some other open source font? Assuming the license allows this, of course.
It feels to me that it should not be too hard, as they don't really need new designs, just modifying or combining the existing glyphs and getting the spacing around them right.