N.B. This is a fork of the Source Code Pro repository

Hasklig - Ligatures for Haskell code

Programming languages are limited to relatively few characters. As a result of a limited character set, combined character operators surfaced quite early, such as the widely used arrow (->), comprised of a hyphen and greater sign. It looks like an arrow if you know the analogy and squint a bit.

Composite glyphs become especially problematic in languages such as Haskell which utilize these complicated operators (<-, ::, =>, -<, >>= etc.) extensively (over 100 in lens alone!). Prettified code improves readability considerably - some Haskell programmers have even resorted to unicode symbols (ie. ⇒, ← etc.). This opens a whole new can of worms. In addition to encoding/compatibility problems and all the reasons it never worked out in APL, these symbols are one-character-wide and therefore eye-strainingly small.

Hasklig solves this problem the way typographers have always solved ill-fitting characters which co-occur often: ligatures. The underlying code stays the same — only the representation changes.

Download

Hasklig

Source Code Pro

Support

Let me know how your editor is supported.

Editors with known ligature support

• Leksah
• TextEdit
• Atom (add text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; to your .editor css.)
• Chocolat
• Kate
• KWrite
• gEdit

No ligature support

• Any terminal editor
• Sublime Text (Vote for the enhancement here)
• MacVim

To Do

1. Glyph substitution for \ → λ and . → ∘
2. Terminal support (for example iTerm2)