Cascadia-code: Not equal ligature for vb language

[pproost]

Hello, love the font.

I have the following issue. We have a mixed codebase (legacy) vb.net and new c#. In vb the not equal sign isn't replaced with the ligature.

With the new font it would be nice if the vb not equal sign <> would also be replaced by the not equal ligature. Now this looks rather ugly in vb files

[PhMajerus]

It actually does have a ligature for the <> sign, it turns it into the air-tight diamond instead of leaving a gap between the two symbols.

[aarondglover]

I agree. Would be great to have VB code use the Not Equal ligature in lieu of the air tight diamond.

Is there a work around in Visual studio or VS Code which can control the font ligatures? ie: Override the ligatures for particular character combinations?

[DHowett-MSFT]

@aaronbell can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that one of the guiding principles of the ligature design was that each ligature would look at least reasonably close to the characters that compose it. I think that having <> turn into what is effectively =/= works counter to that intent; perhaps there's some understanding to be found that "not equal" simply looks different in those languages? It's already a different symbol, and perhaps we should embrace that difference.

[aaronbell]

Generally yes. The ligatures are intended to be a representation of the component characters. However, I can understand that it could be useful to have a different ligature in cases where requested. We added a stylistic set for Lua that swapped ~= with the not equals ligature. If this is something that users in general would like, I can add it into the same stylistic set.

[PhMajerus]

I think completely changing the look of a symbol shouldn't be the job of ligatures, instead that should be a code editor extension if people really want that.

[unageek]

I think making != look like ≠ should not be the job of ligatures either :)

[DHowett]

@mizuno-gsinet you always have the option of not using the ligatured version if you disagree with the ligatures that have been chosen.

[aaronbell]

Hi! I'm going back through old bugs. In reconsidering this, I'm going to leave it as it is. :)