Re: Ligatures

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Clément Pit-Claudel <cpitclaudel@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 19 May 2020 10:35:50 -0400
> 
> > Doesn't sound as a useful default to me.  It could be an optional
> > feature, though.
> 
> Do we know of other editors that support ligatures but chose not to support moving through a composed character?  If not, that would be a fairly strong signal that it's a reasonable default, I'd expect.

OTOH, the current default exists since Emacs 21, so it sounds like a
reasonable default as well.

And I don't think arguing about defaults in Emacs is useful, because
changing the default if you don't like it is easy.  We do change the
default behavior slowly, though.

(And please note that we are talking about defaults for a feature that
doesn't yet exist, which makes this dispute even less useful.)

> > For example, how about a special
> > insert command that would disable ligation with the character it
> > inserts?
> 
> Would that command be called automatically, or would it require a different input?

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.

> I don't think Emacs can guess whether it should enable or disable ligation, so I imagine you mean different input, but that doesn't sound pleasant to use, so maybe I'm misunderstanding?

Emacs cannot, but the user can.  Thus a separate command.