A ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single glyph. For example, Fira Code font by Nikita Prokopov contains a set of ligatures for common programming multi-character combinations like ++, >= or != :
Fira Code font in Visual Studio 2017
Default Consolas font in Visual Studio 2017
This is just a font rendering feature: underlying code stays the same and remains ASCII-compatible – only the representation changes. Not only can multi-character glyphs be rendered more vividly, other problematic things in monospaced fonts, such as spacing can be corrected. With standard fonts your eye spends a non-zero amount of energy to scan, parse and join multiple characters into a single logical one. Programming ligatures help to read and understand code faster:
Fira Code supports modern web browsers and many popular editors such as Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ, Atom, PhpStorm and Xcode. To install it for Visual Studio, download and unzip fonts, right click on the ttf\FiraCode-Regular.ttf file and select Install, (restart Visual Studio) and select Fira Code in Visual Studio font options:
Happy reading!
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