Remove fi/fl

[tonsky]

@tonsky Hi Nikita. Have you seen the discussion here? Many people (including me) strongly dislike these ligatures. They look jarring in a monospace font (everything is spaced out, but then suddenly f and l are fused!?). And worst of all, Tl with the new ligatures looks like π (pi). Wtf. Hehe. Please make these ligatures optional via ss setting... :-( The first feeling after installing the font today was "wow this font is beautiful, but... ewwww that ligature... can I turn it off somehow?"... Sad that I can't. :-( I'd much prefer the original in the OP's post above. :-S

Edit: Ehm... my love for Fira Code was short lived (about 15 minutes). The "Fl / Tl" was so painful to look at that I started looking for other fonts. Found IBM Plex Mono at https://www.ibm.com/plex/ (https://github.com/IBM/plex/releases) which was designed by IBM for their programmers, to be looked at day in and day out. They used pixel-precise angles to ensure sharp rendering. It is incredibly crisp, extremely easy to read, and expertly designed. The italics are a work of art (which my editor uses for comments). There are no ligatures for stuff like !=, but the font puts those characters super close to each other (which looks great), so I don't miss ligatures. There is a modded version at https://github.com/IBM/plex/issues/63#issuecomment-552940293 which adds ligatures if someone really wants that in the IBM Plex font... :-) Anyway, if Fira Code ever improves the "Pi"-like "Tl" situation, I may revisit this font too... but I'm off to IBM land now...

Originally posted by @VideoPlayerCode in https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/issues/795#issuecomment-558014882

[bkDJ]

+1. I recently got 2.0 (from 1.2) for a few of the nice new stylistic sets but was surprised the new Tl, Fl and fl could not be disabled.

[Arcitec]

I do think that Fira Code is beautiful too and would happily revisit this font, but the "fused letters" in a monospace font situation is too jarring to look at.

Thanks a lot for opening this issue, @tonsky! All would be well if fl, Fl, Tl ligatures are optional via 'ssXX' toggles. :-)

[nre-ableton]

Another +1 here. I'm sure I'm not the only programmer using Fira Code who is annoyed by my editor constantly shifting text around when ligatures are updated every time I type file or flex or some other such thing. I love Fira's other ligatures, but this one seems to be very out of place.

[tonsky]

constantly shifting text around

hmm this shouldn’t happen. Even in ligatures, letters have exactly the same dimensions and position

[joshkpeterson]

There's no logical reason that these characters should be fused. Gonna keep shopping around for other fonts. +1 for reverting.

[Coder-256]

@tonsky This is still an issue for me in v2, is there a fix planned for this?

[nre-ableton]

I'm jumping ship to JetBrains Mono, which supports sensible ligatures but didn't go overboard with them.

[Mazwak]

Forget it, I was using jetbrains

For the record, I do not have this problem.

Windows 10, VScodium or powershell FiraCode 2.000

[UtkarshKunwar]

I've created a patched .otf for this Fl/Tl/fl issue at my repo here until we get an official stylistic set. However, I enabled some stylistic sets which I liked (except ss06 and onum/ss20) for code readability and to get them to work with Konsole because I use NeoVim as my primary editor.

[yvvt0379]

I agree. They look like one letter, which is confusing.

[tweakimp]

Is there any reason against making this a setting?

[tonsky]

@tweakimp the amount of stylistic sets is limited to 20. So I have to choose carefully what most important 20 settings are. If I could, I would make everything a setting, of course.

[tweakimp]

Thank you for your answer. How likely is this going to be optional? :)

[tonsky]

I’ll tell when I set down planning v3. I’ll either remove it or move it to a stylistic set

[RubenVerg]

aren't there two types of stylistic sets with 20 each?

[RubenVerg]

(and 21 anyway, I guess. ss00-ss20)

[nre-ableton]

Thanks so much for listening to the community feedback and removing these ligatures!