Diff displays != as single =/= character

[Kike]

Hi

In the new GUI version, I've noticed that Plastic has started displaying != as a unified character (=/=) by default.

That's pretty confusing for a program focused on telling people what changed in a text file. Doing character replacements like that can mislead users or obscure weird problems (what if a program actually inserted that symbol as a special Unicode character?). In my opinion, text should be displayed as is in the file, char per char.

If a user wanted to do this, it should be a preference, but certainly not a default behaviour.

Can this be reversed? If it cannot, can it be toggled off somewhere?

[Wolfram]

In the dot-menu on the right, select "Change editor font...", and choose for example "Lucida Console" or another monospace font, instead of the default "Cascadia Code".

[Kike]

15 minutes ago, Wolfram said:

In the dot-menu on the right, select "Change editor font...", and choose for example "Lucida Console" or another monospace font, instead of the default "Cascadia Code".

Thanks for the tip. At least it's reversible. Still, having that as default is not a good idea. Few programmers know that font feature (ligature characters), and even less like it, having sampled some time ago among my peers.

[Kike]

A post for context on problems caused by these ligatures (I could not find it this morning):

https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures-in-programming-fonts-hell-no.html

As a user of some weird text and localization libraries heavy on UTF-8 filtering, I don't like the chances of confusing code syntax with Unicode characters.

[Wolfram]

I fully agree that it is not a good idea for a tool and/or diff tool that focuses on source code files (as opposed to prose or something else) to use a non-literal (or even a proportional) font as default.

=> Plastic's default font for diff-/code view should be changed to a fixed/monospaced non-ligature literal font.

[ollieblanks]

Definitely! Logged as a task for a fix. Thank you both.