Ship with ligatures disabled, or make a more obvious setting to do that

[ernstki]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

It's only a problem for people who think it's a problem. ;)

Describe the solution you'd like

Ligature support is technological marvel in the field of digital typography, and I've no doubt that Wezterm has world-class support for it.

Practically speaking, however, it's something that—without evidence or data—I predict most programmers who use a variety of languages will eventually want to switch off, especially after the initial novelty wears thin, and particularly in certain contexts where the ligature representations are confusing rather than helpful. (screenshot below)

Therefore, I humbly propose that:

• ligature support in the out-of-the-box setup be shipped disabled, or
• that there be an obvious ligature_support = false option to easily disable it, without having to know anything about the underlying rendering engine

Describe alternatives you've considered

• being less grumpy about new-fangled typographical features that aren't for me
  • (I do like well-hinted fonts and subpixel rendering, though ;)
• just living with some confusing ligature renderings in languages I use a lot (Perl, HTML, PHP)
• searching the issue tracker for "disable ligatures"
• searching the documentation for "disable ligatures"
  • this was only fruitful after I learned that Harfbuzz is the name of a font renderer, which eventually led me to "Advanced Font Shaping Options"

The latter does present an effective workaround

config.harfbuzz_features = { calt=0, clig=0, liga=0 }

but it's not in an easy-to-spot place in the docs, and it requires one to recognize that Harfbuzz is the thing making the ligatures, and to read the OpenType specification to truly understand it.

Additional context

Here's some POD in a Perl script, for example: