Serious (if goofy:) ) question: How do I not use them?
My understanding is that if the font has ligatures then the way to not use them is to use a different font (which is fine - there's a lot of fonts out there :) ).
Is that the only way, or is there a way to disable ligatures but keep the rest of the font? Can you disable only some of the ligatures?
Ligature is a optional feature, first the editor need to support them, but I guess most editors nowadays already support that. JetBrains IDEs come with JetBrains mono and with ligatures enabled, last time I used VScode I had to enable manually for my new font.
Ooh the selectively disabled extension is really cool! Thanks!
I sometimes—rarely happens thought—dislike how the cursor renders on top of ligatures in vscode. Always wished it would allow me to "inject" the cursor into the ligature, but since it didn't happen often or bother me as much, I never tried looking for a solution. This will be a small, but much appreciated quality of life improvement! Thanks again!
regular fonts are basically "use this image for 'a', this image for 'e'" etc. ligatures are extra data that says "if you find an 'a' next to an 'e', use this other image in place of the 'a' and 'e' images". but the non-ligature versions of characters are still in the font for use when there is no ligature sequence (just put a space in the middle of any ligature in your editor and you'll still see the independent characters rendered in the font).
If you don't like them, don't use them. It's that simple.
Other people do like them, and will continue to use and enjoy them.