Hey wait, isn't prettify-symbols-mode old news after Emacs 27?

[jming422]

This is a special shoutout to anybody who's knowledgable about the latest Emacs ligation features like Harfbuzz integration, composition-function-table, and the like - I'd love to learn from you! fira-code-mode is still stuck in the old way of prettify-symbols-mode, and I would absolutely love some pointers or additional resources I can use to learn these new and improved ligation methods.

At the end of the day, the goal of fira-code-mode is to provide an easy way that any Emacs user can "just turn on" programming ligatures. I'd love to include support for Emacs 27+ ligation methods at some point, but since documentation (and my time) is sparse, I haven't been able to dive into it yet.

So if you're interested in, know anything about, or just want to discuss the pros and cons of using the nifty new font ligation tools that are now included with Emacs, this discussion's the place for you!

[jming422]

I've fairly recently discovered another package which is using just these new features that I'm talking about: https://github.com/mickeynp/ligature.el

I'm excited to look into it more and even consider using that package instead of fira-code-mode in my own config. Something like what ligature.el does is much better in line with the future of ligatures in Emacs, as it uses the new features built into Emacs 27 and newer to power what it does in a better way than prettify-symbols-mode will be able to do. Perhaps best of all is that it doesn't require installing a special hack font like Fira Code Symbol to make it work; it uses the ligatures built into the primary font as they were intended by the font designers.

If you're using Emacs 27+ built with a configuration that supports it, I recommend giving ligature.el a try to see what you think - that's what I intend to do one of these days!

It seems to me that packages like this one are the future, while fira-code-mode is destined to be mostly useful on systems whose configuration prohibits using the builtin ligation features of Emacs.