Re: Ligatures

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Clément Pit-Claudel <cpitclaudel@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 19 May 2020 11:44:31 -0400
> 
> > You'd invoke it when you either know in advance you don't want the
> > next character to ligate, or after you saw the ligature to disable the
> > ligation for the sequence at or before point.
> 
> That assumes that I know whether inserting a character will
> introduce a ligation, but I usually don't. [...]

Did you miss the part after "or after"?

> I don't think that will work, but maybe I'm missing something.  How does this work if I open a file that already has a ligature and I want to modify it?  Do I have to explicitly break the ligature before I can edit it?

"M-x toggle-ligature-mode RET", perhaps?  Or go to the ligature you
want to edit and invoke that command I mentioned above (after "or
after")?

> More importantly, though, I don't understand what problem it would solve, at least in the context of programming ligatures.  What is the problem with allowing cursor movement through ligatures like → for ->?

It doesn't feel right to me, and it goes against what Emacs did for
the past 20 years.  But that's me.

But again, this is a purely academic argument.  Ligature support in
Emacs is not yet ready for prime time, the sub-glyph cursor motion
needs to be implemented in the display engine, and only after that it
would make sense arguing about the defaults of this imaginary mode.
Let's not finish arguing now, lest we will have nothing to argue about
then, okay? ;-)