This is sort of my point: I would wish for the world to move towards typing Unicode symbols being a normal thing. That would also imply screen readers properly handling those (if they don’t already). What I don’t like is source code being rendered as something different than the actual printable characters it consists of.
I’m not disputing your preference, I was just stating mine. I do prefer “≥” over “>=“, but not in the form of a double-width ligature that is still “>=“ under the hood.
> Will I ever get as fast typing composed characters as just pressing `>=`?
Typing “>=” usually involves pressing three keys. The same can be true with Compose.
That’s not to say that there isn’t some trade-off in some cases. But the frequently used symbols can be prioritized, and it opens up a vastly larger repertoire of characters you can type. I routinely type foreign languages with accents and other non-ASCII letters using Compose, and it has become muscle memory.
The IDE could also do an automated ASCII to Unicode replacement for certain strings of characters if they are supported in a language, similar to how Microsoft Word automatically replaces (R) with ®, or the like.
Exactly. Though in an IDE it should only be done depending on whether the current language supports the Unicode operators in question. And ideally the replacement shouldn't happen when editing string literals. Though perhaps that is asking for too much.
in vim you can make these definitions dependent on the file type, which is also used to detect languages for eg syntax highlighting. so it's certainly possibly to define these only for a specific language. it should even be possible to define it based on the syntax detected: https://superuser.com/questions/487603/abbreviations-overrid...
I’m not disputing your preference, I was just stating mine. I do prefer “≥” over “>=“, but not in the form of a double-width ligature that is still “>=“ under the hood.
> Will I ever get as fast typing composed characters as just pressing `>=`?
Typing “>=” usually involves pressing three keys. The same can be true with Compose.
That’s not to say that there isn’t some trade-off in some cases. But the frequently used symbols can be prioritized, and it opens up a vastly larger repertoire of characters you can type. I routinely type foreign languages with accents and other non-ASCII letters using Compose, and it has become muscle memory.